Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

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As we said earlier, applets were what started the craze over the Java platform. In practice, people discovered that although they could write animated applets like the famous “nervous text” applet, applets could not do a whole lot of useful stuff in the JDK 1.0 security model. For example, because applets under JDK 1.0 were so closely supervised, they couldn't do much good on a corporate intranet, even though relatively little risk attaches to executing an applet from your company's secure intranet. It quickly became clear to Sun that for applets to become truly useful, it was important for users to be able to assign different levels of security, depending on where the applet originated. If an applet comes from a trusted supplier ...