What is the equivalent of a Java applet in .NET?

Question

What is the equivalent of a Java applet in .NET? Is it Silverlight? Is Java applet still widely in use?

Answer 1

Java applets were "the new hot thing" in 1997, when Java 1.0 came out. After a few years, they became less and less popular, mainly because installing Java on a computer was a big hurdle for many people (you had to download the whole JRE, which was big, it took a long time to install and Java was not that fast at that time - so many people saw it as a slow, bloated thing).

Macromedia Flash (which became Adobe Flash later, ofcourse) had advantages over Java applets in this regard - the plug-in was quick and easy to install, and so it became the dominant thing for interactive multimedia stuff on the web.

Microsoft's Silverlight is meant to be a competitor for Flash and Sun's JavaFX.

JavaFX is Sun's technology that should make it easy to do Flash-like things on the Java virtual machine. If JavaFX becomes a success, then Java applets using JavaFX might become popular again.

Note that earlier this year, Sun released a completely rewritten Java browser plug-in which is quicker and easier to install than the old plug-in. On of the things Sun is working on is making it just as easy to install the Java plug-in as it is to install the Flash plug-in.