The Basics
Applets are programs that can run within a web browser. Applets require an interpreter in order to run. The applet interpreter is called a Virtual Machine (VM) or Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The makers of Java (Oracle, Inc.) provide a browser plug-in which is free for download from their web site. If you have difficulties, search “run java applets on my machine” (fill in the specifics for your machine). Java applets do not currently run on all computers.