Java Plug-in : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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Java Plug-in

Formerly called the Activator and now officially called the Java Plug-In. Sun’s Java environment that acts as a plug-in to a browser, replacing any JVM that browser had. This way you can update your JVM without needing a new version of the entire browser. It also makes it more difficult for Microsoft Internet Explorer to avoid supporting the full Java JVM. In the older browsers without proper plug-in support, the HTML viewed had to contain contain <EMBED> tags for Netscape and <OBJECT> tags for Internet Explorer to invoke the Plugin. If they contained only the standard Java <APPLET… > tags, the browser would insist on using its obsolete built-in Java implementation even if it has the plugin installed. Download the HTML Converter j as part of the JRE 1.3+ to prepare the complex <EMBED> and <OBJECT> tags. Personally, I find the EMBED syntax so repulsively ugly I refuse to use it.

You can only have one version of the Java plug-in installed on a machine at a time. The Java Plug-In Control Panel will appear either on your start menu or in the Control Panel. In the early versions of Java, if you wanted to switch, you had to uninstall and install a different version. With Java 1.5, you just deactivate one version and activate another in the Java Control Panel.

The versions of Opera, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and IE available today no longer require the awkward <EMBED> syntax.

In the windows Control Panel is a program to manage how the plug-in works. At first it looks as though nothing happened when you click it, but when you close the Control Panel, you will see the plug-in manager window hiding behind the Control Panel window.

Netscape
Opera
student project to manage the Plug-In

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