However, my experience writing the equivalent of a 2 line version of "Hello World" is that all the effort spent on Java development is totally wasted.

The advertising slogan is

Many web designers say

However, my experience is

(I am told that WordPefect spent millions developing a Java version. Since it is not on the market, I assume that they had the same experience.)

• Under VisualAge, the text displayed perfectly. An imbedded \n caused the expected line break. The alignment attribute caused both lines of text to be centered in their object.
• In IE 4.0, IE 4.47, IE 4,72, and IE 5.00, the \n displayed as a vertical bar and the text was rendered on a single line.
• In Netscape 3.02 Gold and Netscape Communicator 4.05, none of the text showed

Thus proving that adage - Write Once and Throw It Away

IBM's VisualAge placed the following code in the application

   setLayout(null); 

Well, documented or not, the null layout is probably the best layout because it gives the programmer the most control over how the application will be displayed. (Of course, one of the touted benifits of Java is that the developer can only suggest how the application will be displayed. Give me a break.) For more details, see here.

When I write html code (using notepad, of course :), I do a save (Alt f s), Alt-Tab to the browser, and refresh (F5 in IE) to view the changes. Therefore, I expected Java to work the same way.

Suprise ... refresh does not load the new class file. Instead, you have to kill all instances of your browser and restart it in order to read the new code. What a load of ... . I spent hours trying to find a way around this stupidity.

This nonsense was tested with both IE 4.0 and Netscape Communicator. I hearby confirm that both products are brain dead!

Actually, Ctrl-F5 is supposed to re-load class files in IE 4.0 (I have verified this with IE 4.72).
Ctrl Shift R is supposed to cause Netscape to re-load everything (I haven't verified this yet).

• Class names are case sensitive. Every applet must contain a class definition with the same name as the class file. In the html file, the Java class file and the initial class are identified with an applet tag
  <applet code = "Name.class" ></applet>
  Both the string after the code paramter and the class name must use the same case on a letter-by-letter basis. (Guess how long this took to figure out.)
• The only way to write portable code is to use only Java 1.0 commands. If Java 1.1 commands are used, Netscape 3.x and IE 3.x will report errors and not run your code. Unfortunately, the Java 1.1 language and Visual J++ 6.0 report many Java 1.0 commands as deprecated meaning that they will eventually be dropped from the language. The best guidance that I can give is to always use deprecated commands and take your chances.
• codebase does not work with netscape communicator! It generates class not found errors.

• This 1996 Tutorial is pretty good. It contains a very simple "Hi Mom" applet which writes a single line of text to the screen. If you really want to waste your time with Java, then start here.
• The Java Hall of Shame lists a number of problems with JDK 1.0.2. Examples are provided.
• Sun Microsystems, Inc. has a whole site devoted to Java. They claim over 700,000 Java developers. The technical section requires free registration. However, I am not impressed with their site. It mostly talks about how great Java is but does not say anything useful.
• microsoft.public.java.visualj++ news group. This is where many otherwise undocumented hints are revealed - such as using ^F5 to reload class files in IE 4.0.
• My Java Development page.
• Major security hole - MS Internet Explorer and HTML e-mail readers allow Java applets to run ANY ActiveX component. This hole allows full access to your system by anyone on the net. (Reported by zdnet with a patch and additional info.)

URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / HTML_Examples / Java.htm