Improving Applet Downloads

Waiting for an applet to finish downloading can be annoying at times, especially for a big applet. A quote like "Great applet, but it takes 5 minutes to download" does not inspire people to run out and try it.

Although there aren't any tricks to shove bits through the network any faster, you can make your applets aware that things might take a while and give the user something to do while he waits.

One of the many nice features of Java is that it can load classes while a program is running. There are some limits on this, however.

If a method references a class, that class must be loaded before the method is executed. Java uses a one-time lookup mechanism for efficiency. The first time an instruction referencing another ...

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