Porting a Python Application to the Web Using Django: A Case Study of an Archaeological Image Processing System

In recent years, desktop applications are often ported to the Web. This is because Web applications running in a cloud environment have many advantages, for example, they can be used by a wide variety of clients over the Internet and can dynamically allocate computing resources according to demand. Such porting is also very important in terms of effectively utilizing existing software assets in a modern environment. However, porting to the Web involves numerous considerations that are not easy for those without the knowledge and skills to perform. In this paper we describe in detail our experience of porting a desktop Python application, which uses the image processing library OpenCV and the GUI library PySimpleGUI, into a web application, which uses the web framework Django, the CSS framework Bootstrap, the database management system MySQL and phpMyAdmin. We also employed Docker and Docker Compose for flexible development and deployment. Through our experience, we have identified six key aspects to consider when porting a desktop application to the web. This paper will elaborate on these aspects and how to deal with them. This paper also reports which parts of source code could be reused, which parts had to be newly developed, and the size and time required to conduct reuse, modification, and additional development.