With its Nexaweb Advance product and service offering made today, Nexaweb Technologies is looking to provide an easy way to move desktop applications to the Web. Nexaweb Advance attempts to overcome manual processes usually required in making such a move so users can get the benefits of a richer experience. "To do so takes a lot of investment in reverse-engineering the applications, typically in technologies where they don't have the skills anymore," such as requiring Cobol or ColdFusion skills, said David McFarlane, COO of Nexaweb.

With Advance, applications are converted from 3GL and 4GL (third- and fourth-generation language) technologies to become rich, composite Web applications. Applications such as call center, ERP, and sales force automation systems can be converted. Users can redeploy applications in AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or Java and leverage Flash, .Net, and Swing technologies.

[ Adobe's AIR is another new technology advancing Web-delivered apps. ]

With Advance, Nexaweb is helping companies take their intellectual property and move it into an environment that will serve them in the future, said analyst Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates. "It would be one thing if [users] could just throw [software] away and start from scratch, but there's a lot of [intellectual property] that these companies have built up in their software," Hurwitz said.

Nexaweb Advance deploys a three-step process. In the first step, Nexaweb documents applications through automated tooling that reverse-engineers the application's original source code and creates a UML (Unified Modeling Language) model of the application components and accompanying workflow and UI. "It's a batch process that Nexaweb runs for the customer," said McFarlane.

With the second step, Nexaweb uses its Nexaweb Studio development environment to leverage UML to refactor and redesign the application. Duplicate code is eliminated as well.

In step three, Nexaweb deploys the application as a rich Web application using the Nexaweb Platform runtime.

"We have the ability to deploy logic on the server or on the client," said McFarlane.

Nexaweb Advance pricing starts at about $2,000 per application screen.