CheerpJ WebAssembly-based JVM Version 4.1 Is Here |
Written by Nikos Vaggalis | |||
Thursday, 12 June 2025 | |||
If you thought that legacy apps are not used anymore in this day and age, think again. With pre-4 version CheerpJ you could run legacy Java apps on browsers. With version 4+ you can run modern apps too. The newest version of the WebAssembly based JVM, CheerpJ, v 4.1, is out with the biggest change being that it now has preliminary support for Java 17. It comes just one month after release 4.0, which had brought support for Java 11. The deal is that the pre-4 versions were using Java 8 as the baseline, but as the Java ecosystem modernizes it was time for CheerpJ to upgrade too, by moving on to support modern LTS releases. The way it juggles different JDKs is that while CheerpJ for Java 11 and 17 is distributed with both runtimes, thanks to its on-demand package loading architecture, only the relevant runtime is loaded dynamically at runtime. As a refresher, CheerpJ's main characteristics are :
The fact that it can run unmodified JAR files has been showcased by creating a side project named Browsercraft, a web-based Java version of Minecraft which is not based on decompilation or reverse engineering. Rather the original client.jar and its LWJGL dependency, available from Maven, runs unmodified on the end-user browser. The new 4.0 and 4.1 versions combined introduce:
CheerpJ is also built with interoperation in mind as the Java app that runs inside the browser can call native Java libraries which are loaded and executed dynamically and are wrapped as WebAssembly modules accessible through JNI WebAssembly. Ultimately, CheerpJ aims to become THE enterprise grade distribution of OpenJDK in WebAssembly that allows most UI-based Java Desktop applications to run in the browser.
More InformationCheerpJ 4.1: Java in the browser, now supporting Java 17 (preview) Related ArticlesCheerpJ 3.0 - Run Java Apps Inside The Browser
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 12 June 2025 ) |