Q: We would like to enable our users to annotate PDF documents “online” and deploy jPDFNotes within an applet. Can jPDFNotes run in Internet browsers such as IE6 or Firefox or Safari? What are the best practice instructions on how to configure the applet for optimal performance and minimal user-intervention?

A: jPDFNotes can run in IE 6, Firefox and Safari as well as most browsers. When running an applet, the browser is actually not involved too much, it simply launches the Java plug-in and then it lets it run. This means that configuration is handled through the HTML that launched the applet, and actually, there is not much to configure to run properly.

You can find a few applet samples to deploy jPDFNotes, at this link:
http://www.qoppa.com/pdfnotes/demo/applets

For instance, this is our basic applet sample:
http://www.qoppa.com/files/pdfnotes/demo/applet.html

Please take a look at the HTML page source for our basic applet by right-clicking on the page and choosing “View Page Source”), you will see that it includes the line:

<script src="http://java.com/js/deployJava.js"></script>

This is the script provided by Oracle which takes care of deciding what will work better for the browser and will auto-install Java is not installed on the client machine.

Our applet sample are also configured to:

– Run in Java 1.6.0 Update 10 or later

var version = "1.6.0_10";

We recommend Java 1.6 for performance and starting with Update 10, Java lets the applet request more memory than 64 MB, the default.

– Requests that the applet be given 256 MB to run in.

java_arguments:"-Xmx256m"

By default, Java only allows 64 MB for an applet, by using -Xmx256m, we ask for 256 MB to run better (we do a lot of memory caching of rendered pages and such).