Subject:	The world is moving on, but there is hope.
	Date:	2006-01-29 14:14:56
	From:	ilazarte
Our manager wont allow them to be deployed at our work for several reasons, 1. He's aware there are several alternative technologies that satisfy the applet scope: Ajax and Flash. 2. Applets seem to fail to often too quickly, and he's concerned about the technologies stability. While I haven't any work into them, my assessment is pretty much the same. Poor usability, established technologies seem to do the job better. However, there is a hope: http://www.processing.org is an example of a great framework for the technology. What the processing team has realized is that full featured web apps aren't what the applet's best usage is. Instead, focus on the flash and the multimedia delivery. How many Macromedia Flash guis are really taken seriously? Flash itself is going to have ot work really damn hard to not lose it's Component usage against Ajax enabled HTML forms. And even where multimedia is concerned, there is a rumbling movement of people who are wrapping flash components in javascript for unified application development that is multimedia. Check out http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager/ for a great library that wraps flash in javascript so you dont have to code those ugly connectors. 3. JRE is the wrong platform for applets. If Sun had stepped back and realized they needed a JBE (Java browser edition) which is more along the lines of SVG, Flash, Sparkle, without all the bulk of the JRE; things might be different. Let's face it, applets just need a runtime like Flash: high level visual/audio framework, XML/HTTP communication, and basic (preferably dynamic!) scripting. Flash is popular because it makes eye-candy easy, has a scripting language (JS), and is backed by a great IDE for *designers*. It's almost laughable the lead Sun had on Macromedia, and yet Flash is everywhere and Java applets are rare! A scripting interface would be great, but more importantly there needs to be a Java multimedia lowerlevel framework that makes all those cool audio/video effects possible within the browser. This Java needs this anyway, the community seems to be constantly unsatisfied by it's options (although LWJGL http://www.lwjgl.org is a nice provider of such items)