Peter,

From: "Peter Booth" <pbooth / nocoincidences.com>
>
> What would be the "sweet spot" for applets?
> 
> I acknowledge my prejudice, reluctantly accepting that memories of  
> ancient rants about "craplets" are not just a bad dream.

For me, I'm interested in hardware accelerated 2D and 3D
graphics.

Although I'm impressed with what people are accomplishing
with dynamic HTML and JavaScript these days, most of the
best web applications still feel clunky to me.

Recently, it has become possible to write applets that
make use of both 2D and 3D hardware accelerated graphics,
which run in modern browers on windows, linux, and OS X.

2D example:
https://jdk6.dev.java.net/Java2DApplet.html

Simple 3D example (gears demo)
https://jogl-demos.dev.java.net/applettest.html

The following is a nice example mixing 2D rendering into
3D textures.  (It is not packaged as an applet, but, it
could be!)
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/campbell/archive/2007/01/java_2d_and_jog.html

Finally, an older demo, nothing too special graphically,
but showing some of the GUI widgets available to applets:
http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/1.4.1/demos/jfc/SwingSet2/SwingSet2.html

Also - it's also now possible to actually drag and drop
files from your desktop, onto an applet!

For that to work the applet binary has to be signed, and
the user has to click OK at a prompt allowing the applet
to run.  But still... real drag & drop from the desktop
into a web app has nice possibilities:
http://www.radinks.com/upload/applet.php


My feeling is, the above technologies could be combined
in a way that could result in a pretty formidable web
application.  (Also, note, while the above tend to show
fixed size applets, one only need place the applet in
a variable width div (e.g. width="80%" or whatever) and
the applets resize just fine along with the browser 
window.)

But -- of course -- I'd **much** rather code an app like
this in Ruby, than Java... :)

Thus my excitement at the possibility of having a mini
version of JRuby for applets.


Regards,

Bill