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Java Applets • What Is A Java Applet? • Will Applets Work On Every PC? • External URLs Don't Work • Styles And Textures Don't Work • How Can I Make The Background Transparent? • Problems With Dynamic Applet Building What Is A Java Applet? A Java applet is a tiny 3rd party program that is downloaded onto your site visitor's computer. The Mercury Java applets combine powerful button/tab graphics generators with an automatic navigation program, allowing you to simply and quickly configure and add them to your web pages. Will Applets Work On Every PC? The vast majority of Windows computers (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP) are distributed with the capability of running Java applets. Additionally, Java applets are compatible with most popular internet browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. External URLs Don't Work External URLs must be prefixed by "http://". If you define - say - www.wibbleware.com as a 'Page_x' parameter value, you will find this does not work because Mercury treats it like a relative URL. The only way that you can direct Mercury to an external URL is to use the full address syntax - http://www.wibbleware.com See Sets, Text and URLs for further information. Styles And Textures Don't Work When no graphical styles or textures are displayed on buttons or tabs, this means you are running the Trial applet outside of the trial environment. The trial applets must be kept in a folder called 'wibbleware'. If you don't (for instance if you put them on your site) you will not be able to specify styles or textures, resulting in rather bland menus. No such restriction is in force on the full versions, so if you wish to use either of these applets on your web site, you'll need to purchase them from www.wibbleware.com. How Can I Make The Background Transparent? Unfortunately, Java applets can't have transparent backgrounds. However, you can alter the background color of the applet to match the background color of the page to make the background appear to be transparent. See the information on the BGColor parameter for more information. Problems With Dynamic Applet Building As you may have noticed on the Interactive Menu Builder page (where a Mercury applet sample is interactively altered according to simple drop-down selections) it is possible to dynamically generate an applet on an HTML page. You may wish to use one of the Mercury applets in a similar way to create your own button-generation software. You should therefore take note there is a known problem with this approach. On one particular JRE version (1.4.1), the applet appears to lose track of the internal graphics coordinate system. I noticed on Mercury that the graphics window was offset 3 pixels left, and 33 pixels up. This only seems to happen when the DHTML innerHTML property is used to dynamically create the applet on the page. If document.write is used to create the applet when the page loads, the applet operates correctly. I've spent a lot of time and effort looking into this issue and (so far) haven't found a satisfactory resolution. My first instinct was to try to get the applet to detect when it was using the wierd offset coordinate system, thinking I could simply 'offset the offset' to cancel out the effect. This proved to be an extremely difficult exercise, however. The applet thinks everything is fine and doesn't recognise that the graphics window actually looks offset in the browser. Since the applet thinks everything is fine when it isn't, I tried different methods of rebuilding the applet though DHTML. Document.Write worked okay, but that's a once-only operation and not appropriate for true dynamic web page rebuilding. Another option would be to have the applet on a separate HTML page, with the applet parameters being set from the querystring with a little bit of JavaScript code. The separate page could then be displayed in an <iframe> (IE) or <ilayer> (NS) element - but then it's off into the old browser compatibility issues again... There's no reason why this solution wouldn't work in theory, but I haven't got around to trying it yet. Things are simpler if you use a language such as Visual Basic to take your parameter selections, overwrite your HTML file, and then simply display it in the Microsoft Internet Control component. This approach works fine and seems to demonstrate that the combination of JRE 1.4.1 and rebuilding the applet on the fly with the innerHTML method causes some kind of internal glitch within the Java applet. Contact Us We're continuously monitoring feedback and improving our documentation to provide the best service we can. The site FAQ will be regularly updated to reflect this feedback. If you experience any problems or have any queries running the Mercury applets, please contact support@wibbleware.com. |
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