Internet home page

Question

Hello everyone.
I am relatively new to Java. I've been writing Java code for about a year and a half - mostly with the aid of the Sun tutorials, a couple of books I bought, and reading this forum. In a prior life I did do some dBASE programming, so a good portion of those 18 months were spent trying to un-learn the procedural approach that dBASE imposed on me and getting my head around OOP. I've also tried to read the JLS but, I must admit, found much of the text to be over my head.
Having said that, I think I've made some fairly good progress - I believe I do understand interfaces and polymorphism. At a very simple level, I can write programs in TextPad using the Collections framework and Swing. For example, I wrote a little banking program with three JTextFields allowing me to input an amount, an interest rate, and a term. There are two JButtons - "Calculate" and "Exit", and two JRadioButtons allowing me to choose whether I want a monthly payment to be calculated or a future value. It actually works and produces correct values. I've also written a program that dynamically queries an Oracle database with user input conditions.
Anyhow, I'm now looking to step it up a notch. I realize questions like this have probably been asked before but searching the forums haven't yielded anything useful. Specifically, I'd like to now try to create a very basic Internet home page and I need some advice on which direction to go. It seems there are some extra layers to that task which are over and above just knowing J2SE. Is this a question of looking to other more advanced Java technologies, and if so, which, or do I need to investigate other resources - or both? I am thoroughly confused.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Just showing a static page has nothing to do with Java. You'll need to create an HTML page and upload it to a server. There are plenty of tutorials on that.
An applet is just a Java program that runs inside a restricted environment in your browser. For simple programs such as the one you wrote above, it's probably not too hard to convert from an application to an applet: put what currently happens in your main() method in the init() method of the applet. Applet tutorials should be easy enough to find, too.
To make an applet accessible from a public webpage, you'll need to upload an HTML with the appropriate code for showing an applet along with the class files or jar file containing the compiled applet code to a webhost. Your webhosting company will generally don't "do the rest", they'll just allow you to upload files. However, if you do things right, it should "just work".
Once you move to client-server programming, things will be different. At that point, you'll need an active component on the server (an application server) capable of running the server side of your web application. The interface to that application will still be HTML pages, but they will most likely be generated dynamically on the server.