A Market leader in the provision of human resource software, one of our Clients’ core products is sold to over 100,000 businesses worldwide.

The product, developed over a time span of two decades, involving numerous developers, frameworks and third-party software components, is part of the flagship offering of our Client. 

The application was originally written as a monolithic Java 8 application, amounting to over 1M sloc. The application would be installed locally at the user premises, as a ‘traditional’ Desktop application.

However, In 2019, our Clients’ management took the decision to embark on a project to migrate this product offering to a SaaS, cloud-based model where the application would be provided as a web application.

They were faced with two options:

• a full reimplementation of client and server components, which would have taken many years, and would have had significant costs.
• a part-reimplementation, part-automated porting of the client, while maintaining the server-side components of the application in full.

Our Client decided to utilise the CheerpJ Java-to-HTML5 solution as part of this complex product modernisation.

The new release of the Client’s product features a new User Interface developed from scratch using HTML5 technologies, providing a uniform UX/UI with all other of Client’s SaaS products. 

However, the majority of the Java client-side business logic was preserved in Java, and converted with CheerpJ. The converted code was then integrated with the new UI, as part of a hybrid application. This code is still maintained and updated in Java.

The Result

As a result, CheerpJ is currently part of our Clients’ technical stack and is integrated into their CI/CD pipeline. The application was released in 2020 as a pure HTML5 web application, and has been updated and actively maintained since.

By using CheerpJ, the Client drastically reduced their development timeline and effort for a new release, eliminating the risk of duplicating bugs and re-implementing complex features. By preserving most of their Java code base, they were also able to make the most of their existing developer skills.