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A Java applet is an applet delivered in the form of Java bytecode.
Java applets can run in a Web browser using a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), or in Sun's Applet Viewer, a stand alone tool to test applets. Java applets were
introduced in the first version of the Java language in 1995. Java applets are usually written in the Java programming language but they can also be written
in other languages that compile to Java bytecode such as Jython. Applets are used to provide interactive features to web applications that cannot be provided
by HTML. Since Java's bytecode is platform independent, Java applets can be executed by browsers for many platforms, including Windows, Unix, Mac OS and Linux.
There are open source tools like applet2app which can be used to convert an applet to a stand alone Java application windows executable. This has the advantage
of running a Java applet in offline mode without the need for internet browser software. A Java Servlet is sometimes informally compared to be "like"
a server-side applet, but it is different in its language, functions, and in each of the characteristics described here.
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