CODEWITHSUNDEEP
applet
Bogdanovist
Bogdanovist

Reputation: 1546

Are java applets a poor choice for new web content?

I work for a government science based agency that provides a lot of technical information through our website. Web development is not really our strong suit, but we get by. A lot of our current content is delivered via Java applets. Recently we have had feedback from users that they cannot access various bits of the site, because their browsers (primarily Safari and Firefox) have disabled Java due to security issues. Of course this can be fixed in both cases by upgrading and/or changing preferences but it still raises a barrier that might be too high for non savvy users.

So my question is what is the probable future for Java applets? Is this an approach that is likely to become less common and the proportion of browser configurations that can't/won't run them increase? As I mentioned my organisation (and myself) are not web development experts so we don't have a good sense of the trends. Should new content be written in something other than Java applets (our most recently developed content uses JavaScript instead). Should we plan to convert the applets over in response to diminishing support?

Upvotes: 7

Views: 1105

Answers (3)

HackCode
HackCode

Reputation: 1847

Using Java applet for content delivery,as pointed out,is indeed a poor choice of Technology.
Modern browsers are capable of doing almost anything applets can offer. Hence,the use of applets have become rather redundant nowadays.

Upvotes: 3

user1657170
user1657170

Reputation: 318

Firefox and Chrome are pushing for JavaScript and Native Client and have disabled Java for political reasons, not security reasons. There where a short period of time where some specific versions of the Java Plugin where a security problem. Apple blocked these versions, while FF and Chrome used it as an excuse to disable it completely.

What technology are best pends entirely on your use case. If development time are the most important factor I would say that Applets using the Swing framework are the way to go. You can use the Swing designer in Netbeans to quickly make GUI:s. Also the performance of a Swing based GUI are superior to that of Flash or HTML+JavaScript.

But keep in mind that browser support will be limited, users will get security questions etc, However if the data you are exposing are sufficiently interesting to the user this would not matter.

If I where to design a startup website that needs to work well in all browsers, fit into search engines etc Applets would be a dead end.

If I where to design a complex website that presents data that are already in demand from an existing userbase, I would go for Java Applets.

As a third option you can do both. Make a simplified website using HTML+JavaScript and a more advanced Applet version using Swing. This would be viable option even for sites that need to be attractive to new users, where some materials would be accessible for search engines and a front page would work in all browsers.

Upvotes: 0

Greg Hewgill
Greg Hewgill

Reputation: 992747

The current trend is pretty clearly toward less support of Java applets in client-side browsers. It never really worked very well and there are now better ways of presenting dynamic information in web sites.

Building a new web site today that relies on a Java applet for content delivery would be a poor technology choice.

Upvotes: 7

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