Pascal Ledru

It's widely known that an applet isn't allowed to create a network connection to a computer that's not the one from which the applet itself was loaded. This has led to the idea that two applets aren't allowed to communicate directly with each other unless they're located on the same host. This article provides a brief overview of Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI), describes a small conferencing program and shows how direct applet-to-applet communication can be established with RMI. RMI's Overview Three approaches for programming distributed systems can be identified. The first one consists of using a low-level API such as the java.net package. The second one uses middleware such as OMG's CORBA. The third one consists of using a high level API such as RMI. In a nutshell, the advantages of using RMI over other approaches are: Transparency: From the programmer's pers... (more)

Designing a Web Browser

A Web browser is often considered a very complex application. In this article I'll go over the design and implementation of a simple browser offering a look somewhat similar to Navigator and Internet Explorer. I'll use an existing HTML renderer and several classes of the Swing API. This will give us the opportunity to review some classes introduced in the Swing API, such as JPanel, JButton, JLabel, JOptionPane and JProgressBar. Most of the classes will have AWT equivalent classes, but they all provide additional capabilities. For example, JPanel provides the option of displaying ... (more)