Section 5.6. Dispensing with Applets

5.6. Dispensing with Applets

While this book does not cover writing applets, we should mention that, since an applet does not (generally) have a main() method, you need something else to launch it outside of a browser. Enter appletviewer. This program provides an execution environment for applets.

Why No Applets?

The decision to not cover applets was based both on limited space and on some deployment issues with applets. A surprisingly large number of people are running with either very old browsers that support only Java 1.1.x features, or that support Java runtime plug-ins but do not have them installed or enabled. Also, applets have severe limitations (for sound security reasons), and enabling various features requires a good understanding of the SecurityManager Java classes, which could fill a book by themselves. We chose to minimize coverage of applets for these reasons.