Application vs. Applets

There are two categories of Java programs:
1. Java applications (which run with a Java Interpreter)
2. Java applets

Java applications are stand alone program in the traditional sense. Java applets are programs designed to be run from browsers such as Nestcape Navigator, IE, Mozilla etc. The focus of an applet is the WWW, although several other tools(such as appletviewer) can also run Java applets. Applets are normally embedded with HTML documents.

An applet runs in a context that provides windowing support, multimedia support(graphics, sound, etc.) and network support.

Java application source code looks somewhat different from Java applet source code. For example, Java programmers must write a method named main for every application, but may never do so for an applet. Despite the differences, it is fairly easy to convert Java application source code into Java applet source code.