Unwanted reloading Applet behavior

Question

I have a dynamic JTree component on an applet and as and when the user uses the application, nodes are added to or deleted from the JTree. But looks like the Applet behavior is to reload the applet everytime it is revisited or minimized/maximized, and hence the JTree goes back to the initial empty tree state. The JTree's root is initialized in the init() and every time the user adds/deletes a node, the JTree is modified to reflect those node changes. But since the applet is part of a multi-frame HTML, the applet gets reloaded each time and reverts back to its initial state.
How can I stop the applet from invoking the init(), start() and stop() method each time? Or is the alternative to using a custom JTree Data model, one that reads its data from a Database make more sense? In that way, everytime the applet is reloaded, the JTree reads the latest data from the database and does not go back to initial empty tree state?
Thanks for all your replies in advance!

Answer 1

If your applet is reloading, then it will go back to the initial state - invokes init method. To create persistent objects, you may be better off to store the state of the object on your server as a file (object serialization) or a data base. So, that you can reload the previous state even when the init method is invoked - applet reloaded.
But if you are just maximizing, minimizing, cover/uncover the broswer that has the JApplet with the JTree it should be able to maintain it's current state since only repaint methods are invoked and not init.