Chet Haase's Blog

November 2006 Archives

All Wound Up

All I hear everyone talking about in the community these days is "Open Sores". Man, get a bandage for it and move on already.

Applet-JAX

Go to the Yapplet Demo

Historically, Java applet development has been somewhat of an exclusive game; you either use Java or you use some other technology.  In the AJAX world, this has led to either Java or a mix of other technologies.

But there is no reason why Java cannot be a player in this world.  Clearly, HTML is pretty good at doing text stuff, the DOM is handy for manipulating elements on the page, and JavaScript is a handy way to get at the DOM elements.  But Java has some unique capabilities, too (including performance, development tools and platforms, robust language and library features, yadda yadda yadda).  So how can we mix these worlds better, so that Java can be another tool in the web application toolbox?

Enter Applet-JAX (Hans Muller's awesome name for this approach); we explore some of the existing infrastructure that allows Java-JavaScript communication to work and thus allows Java to be yet another player in an AJAX application.

There are a host of ideas and possibilities here, but we'll start out pretty simple; go to the Yapplet Demo page to read about and run an applet demo that shows off some of what I'm talking about.

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