[thelist] Applets

[Erika Meyer]

>I accidentally came across this http://www.absurd.org/ and all I could say was
>WOW! Yeah, it's just stupid eye candy but things like that impress me ;)

I like candy applets also.

I liked the popup windows.  I got a kick out of the long skinny ones. 
There are too many dead links on this site, though.

>1. Apparently I will need to learn Java if I want to write my own applets,
>can anyone recommend a good site/book?
>2. How hard a language is it to learn?

Can you program in C?  If you're not a programmer already, Java is 
very challenging.  Though you can probably tweak on other people's 
applets, once you learn the basics.

>3. Apart from not having Java enabled, are there any browser
>incompatibilities?

Browsers don't do Java as well as they're supposed to... I haven't 
seen any really practical and useful cross-platform front end uses 
for Java yet.

Java was invented by Sun engineers.  Here is the origin legend.
http://java.sun.com/nav/whatis/storyofjava.html
There was some trouble with Microsoft in the mid-90's...

Here's Wired on Java, from 1995:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/java.saga.html

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Java applets have not been particularly useful for web front ends, 
IMO.  But it's a neat idea.  I think Java is being used more now 
server side (JSP) and to write other kinds of applications.

As an object-oriented programming language, Java is said to be 
powerful, robust, etc, etc.

But if you just want to play with client side web programming, I'd 
say play with JavaScript first.  The learning curve is much better. 
And you can still do cool and useless stuff with it:
http://www.mediaboy.net/
http://www.superbad.com/
http://www.jodi.org/

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Java:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/java/

JavaScript:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/javascript/

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Erika