Are java applets a poor choice for new web content?

Question

I work for a government science based agency that provides a lot of technical information through our website. Web development is not really our strong suit, but we get by. A lot of our current content is delivered via Java applets. Recently we have had feedback from users that they cannot access various bits of the site, because their browsers (primarily Safari and Firefox) have disabled Java due to security issues. Of course this can be fixed in both cases by upgrading and/or changing preferences but it still raises a barrier that might be too high for non savvy users.

So my question is what is the probable future for Java applets? Is this an approach that is likely to become less common and the proportion of browser configurations that can't/won't run them increase? As I mentioned my organisation (and myself) are not web development experts so we don't have a good sense of the trends. Should new content be written in something other than Java applets (our most recently developed content uses JavaScript instead). Should we plan to convert the applets over in response to diminishing support?

Answer 1

The current trend is pretty clearly toward less support of Java applets in client-side browsers. It never really worked very well and there are now better ways of presenting dynamic information in web sites.

Building a new web site today that relies on a Java applet for content delivery would be a poor technology choice.

Answer 2

Using Java applet for content delivery,as pointed out,is indeed a poor choice of Technology.
Modern browsers are capable of doing almost anything applets can offer. Hence,the use of applets have become rather redundant nowadays.