Updating applets

I am about to engage in a year long project. I will be updating all of those many on-line Java applets on my NTU homepage.

I started creating those applets in 1996, the first year you could create an interactive Java applet and post it on-line. Over time I created various support libraries for them, including a pretty comprehensive 3D software renderer.

But then in January 14, 2014 it all came crashing down — that’s when Oracle officially declared that unsigned Java applets were not ok. From then on my little experiments no longer worked on the Web.

So for the next 12 months I am going to be rewriting as many of them as I can. On the surface they will hopefully look the same, but underneath they will all be Javascript.

Some will run with Canvas2D and others will run with WebGL — I will need to decide on a case by case basis. But the underlying ideas will remain the same.

And that’s the great thing about ideas. Unlike technology, ideas can last forever.