Applets are dead.
I decided to put together a little demo that shows the basic building blocks of using applet technology to build a RIA. I call my applet Crapplet. It builds a little GUI, does javascript to applet communications and vice versa, and fetches remote data from the server. The applet can be found here. A directory holding the source complete with a little build script can be found here.
Now if Sun would do something to reduce load times, browsers would make java plugins easy to install, and people would lose the bad memory of dancing icons - maybe this stuff could become useful again.
My applet has a problem though - when I hit refresh on my browser the applet bails. I must not be using init() correctly. I'm done trouble shooting it though ... time to learn Flex.
