Technical Notes on Using the JAVA Plug-in
 The Bare 
 Minimum 
All that's really needed to get going with plot package is to have the JAVA 1.3 plug-in installed. For a quick reference on\ plug-in installation, see the
JAVA Plug-in Quick-Start Guide

provided by SUN. Even this is often not necessary, since browsers will often automatically detect missing plug-ins and aid the user in downloading them.

Note: At this time, the 1.3.1 plugin may behaves badly in conjuction with Netscape under Solaris unless you are very carefull about Solaris patch levels. If you experience trouble, we recommend trying the 1.3.0_02 version instead. Version 1.3.1 works quite well, however, on all Windows platforms.
 Installing the 
 JAVA Plug-in 
Full instructions on installing the JAVA Plug-in can be found on Sun site (http://java.sun.com/products/plugin). You should install JAVA plug-in version 1.3.0_01 plug-in (or later). As we said, this is the default for up-to-date versions of both Netscape and Explorer.

If you are running Windows 95/98/NT or Solaris 8, that is all there is to it. For those running Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7, several system patches are required to be installed first (i.e. by the superuser) before JAVA 1.3 will run correctly.

The above Sun documentation is really quite good, in particular the Quick-Start Guide mentioned above.
 The Applet 
 Cache 
The JAVA plug-in maintains the JAR files downloaded in a separate cache from that used by the Browsers. This has several advantages:
  • Clearing the Browser cache does not cause you to lose the applet JAR files you have downloaded.
  • On Windows, the same cache is used regardless of whether you use Netscape or Explorer.
  • The plug-in uses its own logic to determine when remote JAR files have been updated and need to be recopied.
  • If the JAR file downloaded is also viable as an executable application, it can be run directly from the cache.
The only disadvantage is that this cache must be managed separately from the Browser cache (assuming that you ever clean up your caches in the first place). However, the JAVA plug-in comes with a management tool, usually installed in the system control panel on Windows or otherwise as an executable named ControlPanel. This tool also lets you control other system resources, like the security certificate described above.