In my opinion the problems with Applets is that
1. difficult to build a good UI, because one needs to keep in mind that the applet could sometime form the majority of the bulk data transfered over the wire
2. Rather limiting from the browser perspective. The javascript <=> applet bi-directional communication is flaky, last time i tried something, it didnt quite work the same way on IE and Firefox.... which made me settle down with one-way communication javascript -> Java.
3. another limitation from the browser side, is that you can really resize the applet dynamically.. We always need to set a height and width.. This is something that is not often done with HTML content.
4. Packaging and deployment issues are faced by a lot of newbies.. The security restrictions can be circumvented by signing the jar file, but this information is one of the most frequently asked question... May be the documentation about Applets needs to be improved.
5. I guess at the end, the bigest issue is the applet to applet communication on the same page.... There is no clear cut definition of how it should / could be done.
6. Given that an applet is a singular unit, people are more comfortable working with Flash as it not only has a great UI builder but essential things like building polls / forms / animations are also provided for. Given the ease of building Flash documents, why would someone go through the pains of doing it as an applet?
7. The oncoming of AJAX has further cut down the need of applets in the majority of the web applications.
Unless there is a specific need for a singular component that does a lot of things at the backend (like communicating with various servers / desktops), there is not much use of the Java Applets.
Just my views.
thanks,
Rogue |
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