Desktop to web app in the blink of an eye

I don't usually write posts (like this or in general) unless there's a reason and right now I am so impressed that I have a good one.

We all have hobbies, we all have ideas, we all have some skills and knowledge and we all try to merge them all together. When a developer like me wants to do that, a new projects comes to life. One of mine is a statistics tracker for board game nights with my family - what games we play the most, who won last time, how much time it usually takes to finish a round, etc. I didn't plan to "go global" with that project. It was supposed to be just for me and my curiosity, to see and keep track of some data on my laptop that I have almost always beside me so I made a very simple and basic desktop app. It turned out that other family members and friends liked my idea and they would like to use it as well but this births problems that I didn't think of before:

-Not everyone has a laptop and the PC is not in the same room where the games take place so running back and forth to click some buttons is not convenient.

-Not everyone is able to download and setup my project in the state that it is right now (alpha version let's say) and the final product that it's heading.

There are of course other reasons as well but those two are the main points. This means that the app is not easy to use and I have to take care of installing and maintaining each deployment. We all know that this is not optimal for anyone and especially me. This also means that it would be a much better choice to make it a web app that could be accessed through a smart TV or just a phone via a web browser. But I didn't know it back when I started that project and right now it needs too much time and effort to go back to square one, especially that I need to learn how to create a web based application as I have never done it before.

Now my deus ex machina comes forth and saves the day - Webswing. After googling for solutions and finding mostly projects that are either not maintained anymore or just for older stuff I stumbled upon https://www.webswing.org . With Webswing I have to do the bare minimum - no code changes, just run the server, setup the path to the jar file, input the name of the main class through the web browser and basically that's all. To be honest, the first time it took me a few hours to see my application running on my internet browser but it was my fault as I didn't create the executable file properly. After fixing my mistake, which by the way was pretty simple as the logs are easily accessible and clear so kudos from me as a dev, it occurred to me that setting everything up would have taken me the same time as it is promoted on the site (15min) from which most of it was reading the quickstart guide and looking where I had saved my project.

I still consider myself a junior developer that hasn't seen much but I have to admit that Webswing is the easiest and fastest tool to set up and use that I have worked with till now. The customer service is very friendly and helpful. Very fast responses and decisions from their management allowed us to come to a very quick agreement about a trial of the full product for which I am extremely grateful. It's a huge relief that thanks to Webswing I can move forward and continue learning new stuff instead of starting the whole project from the beginning and doing the same things all over again.