Fortune 500 HR Software Company turns to CheerpJ for Modernisation of Flagship Product

Industry:
SAAS
Product Used:

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.

What is CheerpJ?

An Enterprise-grade solution to modernise and preserve access to mission-critical Java Applications and Applets by removing the requirement for Java on the client.

CheerpJ converts Java bytecode into WebAssembly and JavaScript, so that it can run natively on modern browsers.

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