Applets and the Internet

Abstract

Java burst on to the computer scene back in 1995. At this time, it looked unlikely that any new programming language could become as influential as Java has within a few years. However, Java had an ace up its sleeve. This ace was not that it was a pure object oriented language, nor was it that it compiled to an intermediate form which could run, without recompilation, on different platforms. Rather, it was that it could be used with the rapidly growing Internet to produce programs which could run within a Web browser (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer). The first Web browser to show this was HotJava, which was also written in Java. The fact that it could run Web pages caught people’s imagination and the rest, as they say, is history.