Mismatch between executing environments: issues in migrating distributed object applications to Web

Abstract

There are tremendous interests and activities in migrating distributed desktop applications to the Web to take advantage of its explosive opportunities. Many would think that the migration effort would be minimal if the application is built using object-oriented and plarform independent language, such as Java. While there is less effort in porting a distributed Java application to the web, the migration effort involves more than just the portability issue. In this experience paper, we highlight several different, but more pervasive issues when we migrated a distributed object application to the Web. Specifically, we use our experience of migrating a JavdCORBA desktop application to the Web to illustrate that the issues of download size, browser security, incompatibility of virtual machines and Web-based protocols are at least as important as the issue of portability. All the issues arise due to the mismatch between the desktop and web execution environments. We present our solutions and highlight several strategies for dealing with future migration of distributed object applications to the Web environment.