Sometimes a standard HTML view on your J2EE-based (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) system doesn't offer a sophisticated enough user interface (UI). Based on the pattern described here, you can enhance such a Web interface with the Java Plug-in. The Java Plug-in lets you embed applets that consume XML documents and display the contained data in a particular way. These XML documents contain presentation data derived from servlets looking at your business logic tier. This lets your users access powerful UI components while still retaining a strong decoupling between the business logic and presentation tiers—without complicated firewall issues. (2,000 words)

Applet caching ensures that applets are not unnecessarily downloaded by a browser every time a user references them.
java Plug-in has supported disk caching in previous versions by using the same cache the browser uses for all other web documents. This works for casual applet usage, but larger applets can often get flushed from the cache to make room for other documents since the browser has no knowledge that an applet file might be needed in the future. The result is that this caching strategy fails where is needed most in large business applets.
The release 1.3 introduces an alternative form of applet caching which allows an applet deployer to decide whether applet should be "sticky", that is, to stay on the disk in a secondary cache which the browser cannot overwrite. The only time "sticky" applets get downloaded after that is when they are updated on their server. Otherwise the applet is always available for quick loading. We recommend that applets which provide core business applications be made sticky to improve their startup performance.

Using HTTP as the communication protocol and a servlet peer for database queries, you can write a rich-content user interface applet that can dynamically interact with a database, yet remain small enough in size to perform well.

• Overview
• Signing Applets
• Deploying Signed Applets
• Changes in Signed Applets in JDK 1.2

This quick tutorial offers you the bare-bones basics needed for working on a Java applet.

This article introduces a means for communicating between a Java applet and an HTML page. (Of course, we'll not use LiveConnect, which can only be used for Netscape.)