Java Cookbook

Chapter 17. Network Clients II: Applets and Web Clients

Introduction

In Chapter 15, I discussed straightforward client applications that communicate over a socket. Now we’ll turn our attention to a variety of other client topics. First let’s look at Java-based web applet client programs. Applets are, as you probably know, small programs that run inside and under the control of a web browser. There’s a discussion of Applet versus JApplet and the Applet methods. Deploying an applet is no different from deploying a web page -- you simply copy it into the web server directory -- but you need an HTML page to invoke it (discussed in Section 17.2). We’ll then discuss some additional client-side topics, such as loading a URL, that apply both to applets and to applications. In Chapter 18, we’ll talk about servlets, which are similar to applets but run inside the process of a web server. There are some issues on the applet deployment side; see Section 23.6 for a means of ensuring that a user’s browser has a Java runtime compatible with your applet. Section 23.12 contains information on Java Web Start, which combines applet-like downloading with full application capabilities.