With all the effort being poured into Javascript lately, it’s pretty evident that that’s the way forward. However, there are still some neat things you can do with applets that you can’t do with Javascript. For instance, I use the microemulator applet to let people play with a simulated phone on the Hecl web site.

Unfortunately, the user experience hasn’t that good. While playing around with the code for that site, Firefox crashed a number of times, and I’ve heard other browsers have trouble as well. No fun.

So it is with some satisfaction that I found this:

https://jdk6.dev.java.net/plugin2/

It’s an updated Java plugin that seems to work much, much better than the old one. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear as if it will be in the new Ubuntu, as it was released recently, but I’m quite happy to have something a bit more stable to develop with.

You can download that version of the Java SDK or JRE here:

http://download.java.net/jdk6/

It’s good to see this effort, even if it may be a bit late.