Force applets to load in same JVM instance?

Question

I've taken over maintenance of an old web application, which uses multiple applets embedded in the same web page. This used to work fine, but since the Next Generation Java plugin was introduced (~1.6.0_10) the individual applets are not guaranteed to load in the same JVM instance. If they load in different JVMs, they cannot communicate through AppletContext.getApplets() or through static variables.

Is there any way we can force the applets to load in the same JVM instance? I saw a workaround mentioned where specifying identical 'java_arguments' parameter may encourage the Java plugin to run applets in the same JVM instance, but this does not work for our application (and in any case is not officially supported by Oracle and hence may disappear any time in any case).

We've also tried replacing direct applet-to-applet communication with indirect applet-to-JavaScript-to-applet communication, but we can't use this approach as our clients use old web browser versions which prevent this from working. I'd be keen to avoid routing all local applet-to-applet communication through a non-local server if at all possible.

Answer 1

We had a similar problem and worked around it by disabling the "next-generation" Java plugin in Java control panel.