Testing applets without a browser —07 May 2011

I don’t like applets. They are troublesome and slow. But that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes I still have to work with it.

I was having some difficulties testing an applet in Chrome. At first the Java Console came up when I clicked on the failing applet, but then it disappeared and I could not bring it back. It also takes ages to load applets, very inconvenient for debugging.

Luckily there is a way to test applets without a browser, with the appletviewer command line tool:

appletviewer applet.html

It’s not perfect though, because the environment can be very different when you run the applet from the command line and when it is executed in a browser. So after testing outside a browser you probably have no choice but to repeat your tests in a browser too.