[bobince]

> Did Java applets actually have a JS API?

Sure. LiveConnect was commonly used as glue to invoke and interact with applets from JS.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it enabled a virtually unlimited blah blah enterprise parp, but it had its uses. A common hack was to put some shared storage in an applet so multiple documents could use it to persist and communicate cross-document data, back before browsers could do that natively.

There was some really tedious bug in IE with the Sun VM that occasionally allowed JS events to fire concurrently whilst LiveConnect was waiting for a response from a method called on an applet, which we never quite figured out. This was one of many things that made JS+applet development unreliable and unpleasant.