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Posted by editor on March 11, 2008 at 6:55 AM PDT

Can applets make a comeback?

After the early enthusiasm for applets faded, some argued that the idea of putting a rich runtime in a box inside a web page was just a silly idea to begin with. Yet the subsequent success of Flash doing more or less the same thing suggests the idea is fine, it's just that the applet implementation, specifically the browser plug-in, was poor.

So, if done right, and with Java's other advantages, like a deep class library and Hotspot-powered performance, could applets still stage a comeback?

A recent presentation by Ken Russell of Sun's Java SE Deployment Team at the Austin JUG has Gregg Sporar asking, Are Applets Back?

In Ken's view, the newly rewritten Java browser plug-in changes everything. The problems with browsers hanging and crashing are gone. In addition, the deployment model for applets will be the same as for Web Start and the integration with JavaScript has improved. More details are in Ken's presentation slides, but just reading through them will not provide you with Ken's enthusiasm or the cool demos that he did.

The new browser plug-in is part of JDK 6 Update 10, which has also been referred to as the "Consumer JRE." It is also known as JDK 6 Update N, because originally they were not sure what update number to assign to it.

So what do you think... is the plug-in the problem, and what will happen once it's fixed?

Also in today's Weblogs, David Herron blogs about Duchesses, FOSDEM, International Womens Day, and diversity. "Clearly women are under-represented in software development jobs. What I did not know is that women are even more under-represented in open source software development."

Finally, in 3 Years later my Bitching became Code: Guilder POC Release, Andreas Schaefer writes: "For the impatient readers I just wanted to announce the release of the Guilder POC which can be found on its wiki, [and] which intends to be a replacement for Maven 2 taking the cool features of Maven 1 and also incorporating some of the cool Groovy stuff to give building projects its Groove back."

In Java Today, the VisualVM project has announced the release of its first beta of the visual JDK tool. As summarized by Luis-Miguel Alventosa's blog, major features of the beta include support for explicit JMX connections, new options panel settings (MBeans tab plotter polling period, JConsole plugin path, and JConsole tabs refresh period), Java core classes excluded by default in the profiler, application snapshots, and a GlassFish plugin available for download on VisualVM Plugin Center.

JSR 318, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, is in Early Draft Review. The goal of the new version " is to further simplify the EJB architecture by reducing its complexity from the developer's point of view, while also adding new functionality in response to the needs of the community. The focus will be on the core session bean and message-driven bean component models and their client API." The review ends on March 30.

Over on The Aquarium, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart reports on the Patterns for Java EE 5 project. "Adam has been making progress on his Patterns for JavaEE 5 project where he will open source all the projects in his Java EE 5 Architekturen book (in German, sorry!). Adam is also using the P4J5 project for additional examples/samples. For example, his recent experiment measuring the (Lack of) Performance Penalty Using EJB3 uses EJB3LoadTest and PojoLoadTest. Also see Adam's State of the P4J5 Project writeup."

In today's Forums, tellmemore wants a comparison of open source jvms for the small device. "I am trying to get information about different implementations of java which are open source. Mainly for embedded devices. Being new to this domain i would like you guys to provide me some insights into this even what parameters should be considered. So far i have been reading about phoneme_feature, phoneme_advanced, kaffe, jamvm, cacaovm. There are many which i am missing. The parameters i am considering so far are performance, size of the final package, open source, level of support for java, packages implemented so far , arm-support , which java version supported, type of license, community activity and siz, is there any closed source component involved, tools required to use this implementation and their licenses."

marshalking offers a Suggestion of extending functionality of DefaultCallbackHandler. "The DefaultCallbackHandler is quite good in most cases, but it does have some limitations that I hope can be solved soon. Using JKS keystore and truststore is an assumption in design, which is OK for me, but it doesn't allow you to change the truststore dynamically at runtime in the DefaultCallbackHandler. Let's imagine such a scenario: I have a certificate service that the client can dynamically download any certificate she wants to use. We can add the downloaded certs to JKS truststore, however the DefaultCallbackHandler wouldn't pick it up because the trustStore is initialized only once. Also as trustStore is private, currently there is no easy way to do that except implementing a customerized CallbackHandler, which is somewhat a copy of the DefaultCallbackHandler."

trembovetski says client-side appearance is getting even better, in the followup Re: Am I going mad? Fonts look great in b12! "FYI, in the just released b13 there's a fix for the d3d pipeline which improves the look of the text (by reducing color fringing). You might want to check it out so see if the text looks even better now."

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Can applets make a comeback?
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