These paradigm changes have greatly increased my power to express program logic, such that my programs have gotten smaller, simpler, and much easier to understand, while supporting ever-increasing user capabilities. When I started programming, I worked with simple command-line interfaces and text-based screen screens.?Next I produced fat-client?graphical user interfaces, and now I work on Web-enabled user interfaces. Again, each paradigm switch has greatly increased user power, flexibility, and ease of use while the code required to produce the interfaces has decreased and is much simpler to understand.

Imagine the advantages of being able to dynamically access a database from client-side JavaScript. You could dynamically query a database from JavaScript for client-side field validation, or dynamically populate a drop-down select list, to name just a few possibilities. In fact, you can do this, with the help of an applet-servlet pair (assuming you can constrain your users to compatible browsers, i.e., IE and Netscape.) This article describes the applet-servlet pair architecture and offers several sample applications.