Java applet

Beginning in 2013, major web browsers began to phase out support for NPAPI, the underlying technology applets used to run.

Unlike early versions of JavaScript, Java applets had access to 3D hardware acceleration, making them well-suited for non-trivial, computation-intensive visualizations.

An applet can also be a text area only; providing, for instance, a cross-platform command-line interface to some remote system.

As applets were available before HTML5, modern CSS and JavaScript interface DOM were standard, they were also widely used for trivial effects such as mouseover and navigation buttons.

This approach, which posed major problems for accessibility and misused system resources, is no longer in use and was strongly discouraged even at the time.

[17] Java Web Start allowed the launching of unmodified applet code, which then ran in a separate window (not inside the invoking browser).

Both object and embed tags can also download and install Java virtual machine (if required) or at least lead to the plugin page.

In January 2016, Oracle announced that Java runtime environments based on JDK 9 will discontinue the browser plug-in.

The 1997 lawsuit,[25] was filed after Microsoft created a modified Java Virtual Machine of their own, which shipped with Internet Explorer.

Other modifications included removal of RMI capability and replacement of Java Native Interface from JNI to RNI, a different standard.

Sun sued for breach of trademark, as the point of Java was that there should be no proprietary extensions and that code should work everywhere.

A later study revealed that applets of this time often contain their own classes that mirror Swing and other newer features in a limited way.

[27] In 2002, Sun filed an antitrust lawsuit, claiming that Microsoft's attempts at illegal monopolization had harmed the Java platform.

[citation needed] Some studies mention applets crashing the browser or overusing CPU resources but these are classified as nuisances and not as true security flaws.

However it could only store such file into a temporary folder (as it is transient data) and has no means to complete the attack by executing it.

A signed applet[32] contains a signature that the browser should verify through a remotely running, independent certificate authority server.

Once the signature is verified, and the user of the current machine also approves, a signed applet can get more rights, becoming equivalent to an ordinary standalone program.

The related concerns include a non-responsive authority server, wrong evaluation of the signer identity when issuing certificates, and known applet publishers still doing something that the user would not approve of.

Consequently, developers who wish to deploy Java applets have no alternative but to acquire trusted certificates from commercial sources.

A Java applet that was created as supplementary demonstration material for a scientific publication
A Java applet that uses 3D hardware acceleration to visualize 3D files in .pdb format downloaded from a server [ 1 ]
Using applet for nontrivial animation illustrating biophysical topic (randomly moving ions pass through voltage gates) [ 2 ]
Using a Java applet for computation – intensive visualization of the Mandelbrot set [ 3 ]
Applets' running speed is sufficient for making e.g. nontrivial computer games that play chess . [ 4 ]
NASA World Wind (open source) is a second generation applet [ 5 ] that makes heavy use of OpenGL and on-demand data downloading to provide a detailed 3D map of the world.
Web access to the server console at the hardware level with the help of a Java applet
Demonstration of image processing using two dimensional Fourier transform