Applets Are Officially Gone, But Java In The Browser Is Better Than Ever

Summary

Applets will be completely removed from Java 26 officially in March 2026. This would officially end the era of applets, which began in 1996. However, for years it has been possible to create modern, interactive web pages in Java without the need for applets or plugins. TeaVM provides fast, performant, and lightweight tooling to transpile Java to run natively in the browser. And thanks to a full front-end toolkit with templates, routing, components, and more, Flavor lets you build your own modern single-page app using 100% Java.

applet history

Applets were first supported in Java 1.0 in 1996. At that time the web was mostly static text, only blink Or marquee Tags (and animated GIFs) to render dynamic elements without server round-trips. Applets allowed Java code to provide full interactivity, whether it was a full AWT/Swing GUI, or a Panel/JPanel on which a full Java2D-rendered view could be built.

Java developers create games, 3D molecule rendering, business applications, and more. While download speeds and processor speeds in the late 90s put some limits on what could be done, the creativity shown was remarkable. And for developers, the deployment model for their code was very attractive: Post your applet to a Web page, and anyone on the planet could run it immediately, as long as they had the Java plug-in installed (which, at the time, was very likely).

In the 2000s, politics intervened and browser vendors removed plug-in support, preferring instead their own walled gardens and restrictive sandboxes that often lagged behind industry standards by years. These years of innovation broke down much of the Internet that depended on plug-ins.

TVM

TVM came to the rescue in 2013, giving Java developers a fast, efficient way to use Java code to run the browser. With short build times, small app sizes, and battery-incorporated build tooling, TeaVM was a revolution in web development with Java. Apps that previously required multiple round-trips, or duplicated validation and logic across 2 incompatible code bases, can now run seamlessly in the browser while sharing code with the backend.

TeaVM, basically, converts Java code into JavaScript (or, these days, WASM). However, much more is needed to make Java code useful for web apps, and TeaVM delivers. It includes a minifier to minify the generated code and obscure the intent, to complicate reverse-engineering. It has a tree-shaker to eliminate unused methods and classes, keeping your app download compact. It packages your code into a single file for easy distribution and inclusion in your HTML page. It also includes wrappers for all the popular browser APIs, so you can easily invoke them from your Java code with full IDE support and auto-correct.

TeaVM is revolutionary in its approach and performance. This is a remarkable achievement that opens doors for Java developers. For some apps, especially games, which primarily render canvasIt may be everything you need. However, for many web apps, you’ll want to create pages from HTML. You want to create and reuse components. You want bindings to reduce the boilerplate for populating form elements and reacting to events. You want to communicate with Java services in a painless way. For these things, you need flavors built on top of TeaVM.

Taste

The Flavor Framework is a battery-powered framework for coding, packaging, and customizing single-page apps implemented in Java. It supports everything you need in a modern web app, including:

• templates
• Component
• route
• JSON handling
• Resource Embedding
• Security

Flavor is 100% open source, licensed under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. You don’t need to worry about license fees or surprises at renewal time.

Flavors are based on HTML templates and CSS for styling, adding custom tags only when necessary to implement SPA functionality (conditional markup, variables, etc.). By leveraging HTML and CSS, Flavor ensures long-term compatibility and builds on the skills you already have.

Flavor has had a stable API since its inception – the code written in the early days works with only minor changes (apart from an annotation on the POJO changed on Wire). And this stability extends to new releases.

It’s easy to get started writing amazing web apps in Flavor:

• The Flavor Book explains everything you need to know to build a web app using Flavor, from the basics down.
• You can listen to the Flavor Podcast