ReWaMP: Rapid Web Migration Prototyping leveraging WebAssembly
Authors
Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Heil
Abstract
Web Migration (WM) is a challenge, in particular for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). In previous collaborations with SMEs we noticed an initial resistance to migrate legacy desktop applications to the web, due to concerns about the risk and lack of developers with web expertise. This initial hurdle can be mitigated by the ability to rapidly create running web prototypes based on the existing desktop codebase and expertise of the developers. Therefore, we outline a rapid prototyping approach for WM, assess technologies which allow execution of legacy code in the browser and present a solution architecture, process and supporting infrastructure based on Web Assembly (WASM). We describe challenges and report on an experiment applying WASM on a scenario desktop application derived from real-world industrial code.
Validation Experiment Results
Here, we provide access to the WebAssembly-based source code and a running live demo of the ReWaMP prototype created during our validation experiment.