Applets in popup frames

A button on the toolbar can be toggled between the "In page" or "Frame" state. When this button is set to "Frame" the the resulting applet will not appear in the page but as a separate frame that pops up over the browser window. The frame will persist until it is explicitly closed.

Applet size

AppletPainter will generate HTML for the frame applet which sets the applets height and width to zero. The actual frame size that appears won't of course be zero but setting it to zero means the applet won't appear on the originating webpage. This approach works fine with Netscape and MS IE but the Java Plugin demands that the applet be allocated space on the originating webpage so when creating a frame with Java plugin HTML, AppletPainter will automatically insert the applet's width and height.

The untrusted applet message

Remember that the browser will display a message across the bottom of the applet frame to indicate that the frame is "untrusted" to the user. It's therefore necessary to leave a gap of around 10 pixels or so at the bottom of the applet.

A quirk in MS IE

When revisiting a page which created a popup frame the frame should reappear but shouldn't be created a second time and this is the way AppletPainter works. However because of the way the Microsoft Java VM is designed it is possible that a duplicate frame can be created when revisiting a webpage if other webpages containing AppletPainter applets have been visited since the original frame was created. The author considers this a bug in the MS VM with no work-arounds and has told Microsoft about it. Netscape has no such problems.