hemju’s code {}

These are two very interesting articles about applets, their history and predictions about their future.

• Are applets making a comeback? by Jeff Friesen.
  Jeff asked some Gurus (Roman Guy, Chet Haase, Jim Weaver and others) about their opinion. I found it very interesting how Roman and Chet, authors of Filthy Rich Clients, responded to the questions. For those who don’t know, Chet just left Sun a couple of weeks ago and now works for Adobe (AIR, Flex).
• The new applet experience by Jeff Friesen.
  In this article Jeff takes a tour into Applets, JavaFX, and Java 6 Update n. Very nice to read and he points out some rough edges of using Java for RIA’s.

Java Applets are the unwelcome guests at a party. They always arrive too late (long startup time), they are fat (favorite food is memory and cpu cycles), and they know everything and can do everything (a lot of frameworks and desktop like behavior), smart-asses. That’s why nobody invites them anymore. Only from time to time you find them on some weird parties (mostly parties about math and science, urgh). However, they are never at the real cool parties because there are the cool guys, like the entertaining and good looking AIR or the I-buy-love-with-money-Mr-Silverlight. Java Applets always wanted to become cool too, but their parents, Sun, only had feelings for the brother, the server side. About 1,5 years ago Sun recognized that Java Applets were so unpopular and sad that they wanted to die. Suddenly, Sun changed their mind and said “We already have one popular child, we can make you cool as well. Let’s go into a camp called Java 6 Update 10 and you will be slim, sporty, and looking fraggin cool.” So Java Applets have been training the last 1,5 years and they are some good results (more here). Another help comes from the cousin, JavaFX, who teaches Java Applets easy social interaction. However, the big question is: Are they still some hosts who will give Java Applets another shot? What’s your opinion?

Here some opinions:

FunkyCodeMonkey

Rick Ross

Where are the Java Applets

Update:

Geertjan wrote a great entry about the new features and a lot of examples: Applets Reloaded