AppletViewer is a standalone, command line program from Sun

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 to run Java applet

Java applet

A Java applet is an applet delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. Java applets can run in a Web browser using a Java Virtual Machine , or in Sun's AppletViewer, a stand-alone tool for testing applets...

s. Appletviewer is generally used by developers for testing their applets before being deployed to a website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

.

As a Java developer, it is a preferred option for running Java applets that do not involve the use of a web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

. Even though the applet viewer logically takes the place of a web browser, it functions very differently from a web browser. The applet viewer operates on HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 documents, but all it looks for is embedded applet tags; any other HTML code in the document is ignored. Each time the applet viewer encounters an applet tag in an HTML document, it launches a separate applet viewer window containing the respective applet.
The only drawback to using the applet viewer is that it will not show how an applet will run within the confines of a real web setting. Because the applet viewer ignores all HTML codes except applet tags, it does not even attempt to display any other information contained in the HTML document.

Appletviewer is included with Sun's JDK

Java Development Kit

The Java Development Kit is an Oracle Corporation product aimed at Java developers. Since the introduction of Java, it has been by far the most widely used Java SDK. On 17 November 2006, Sun announced that it would be released under the GNU General Public License , thus making it free software...

 package, but not with Sun's JRE package. The Java development kit GCJ also has its own version of appletviewer, called "gappletviewer".

External links

• The Java Website
  • [download.jsp Java SE Downloads], JDK
    Java Development Kit
    The Java Development Kit is an Oracle Corporation product aimed at Java developers. Since the introduction of Java, it has been by far the most widely used Java SDK. On 17 November 2006, Sun announced that it would be released under the GNU General Public License , thus making it free software...
    
    download page
  • [docs/tooldocs/ JDK Development Tools], includes detailed documentation of appletviewer and other Java tools