Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

Too often I am faced with examples of poor embedding of Java Applets into a website. It's peculiar to see, because people seem to put in plenty of effort to identify and insert Flash, but nobody seems to have put in that much effort for Java.

This compounds the problems many places see - I have seen it a lot of examples where the webmaster complains about version issues in the JVM, and how "difficult" it is to have their users on the latest version.

Oddly enough, I think perhaps Java's early popularity was it's own demise in this scenario. The "<APPLET>" tag is garbage. It worked fine for early Java 1,0 and 1.1, but since Java 2 it's a hindrance. And yet, everyone keeps using it to embed (perhaps at the prompting of Sun themselves).

I much favour using the browser-specific tags - <EMBED> for FireFox and <OBJECT> for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the other browsers use of the W3C <OBJECT> tag isn't much of an improvement over <APPLET>, but at least you can specify a version number in the "type" parameter.

To address these issues in my own sites, I added a fair amount of Java work into my "Browser Toolkit" JavaScript library. Using this library, I can programmatically check if Java is installed, what version, and dynamically generate either the tag or the DOM objects (although Internet Explorer suffers from some sever problems when it comes to the DOM objects).

I hope others will discover it, and find it useful. It's time to intelligently apply Java Applets.