| At this point, you should be comfortable with using most of the features of the Java programming language, and you had a pretty thorough introduction to basic graphics programming in Java. We hope that you agree with us that Java is a nice (if not perfect), general-purpose OOP language, and the Swing user interface libraries are flexible and useful. That's nice, but it isn't what created the hype around Java. The unbelievable hype during the first few years of Java's life (as mentioned in Chapter 1) stems from applets. An applet is a special kind of Java program that a Java-enabled browser can download from the internet and then run. The hope was that users would be freed from the hassles of installing software, and that they could access their software from any Java-enabled computer or device with an internet connection. For a number of reasons, applets never quite lived up to these expectations. Recently, Sun developed an alternate approach for internet-based application delivery, called Java Web Start, that fixes some of the problems of applets. This chapter shows you how to write and deploy applets, and how to package applets and applications for delivery. Finally, we discuss how your applications can access and store configuration information. |
