J2SE applets stability

Not so long time ago I was doing some research into spurious firefox hangs occuring on applet loading. Looks like sometimes SUN tries to sweep a problem under the carpet. Or even worse - they attempt to patch their way out.

None of these approaches work - as you get either "slightly dysfunctional" components or nasty quantum regressions.

As for the carpet - some of the tickets below are "not reproducible", despite the fact that people are reproducing that massively across multiple bugzillas. See comments for the mojebanka.cz ticket and the last ubuntu ticket too. Also - there're couple of tough tickets with massive votes which once disappeared from public bugzilla - I had a bookmark on that somewhere.

So, for those who firmly believe applets are stable and well-established piece of technology, here goes some plain data (somewhat biased - as this is a bugzilla anyway). Second line is version with delivered fix:

• New plugin applet freezes the browser occasionally 6u10(b21)
• FF3 browser hangs while loading atomica and rocketmania applets from popcap.com 11-Closed, Not Reproducible, bug
• Firefox hang upon first applet launch with Windows OEM builds of Java 6u7(b01)
• Firefox with JDK 6 will cause the browser to hang 6u10(b02)
• Plugin2: Applet from www.mojebanka.cz causes FF3 to hang 11-Closed, Not Reproducible, bug
• Malformed 404s cause breakage of Java/JavaScript bridge and browser hangs 6u11(b03)
• Java Plugin in Firefox hangs since 6u4 when remote policy file is present in java.security 6u10(b26), 6u7-rev(b07)
• If <object> tag is malformed, FF browser either crashes or hangs. 6u10(b07)
• The old plugin hangs firefox 3 when loading java applets That's quite recent Ubuntu bug, not fixed still, affects 8.10 users, 8.04 works fine

Well, actually, I don't think that applets are completely not feasible, but the browser/applet bridging seems to be somewhat shaky. My opinion is that applets are the most pluggable, secure and functional approach, at least for some of possible usage scenarios.

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Open/Closed Principle : Strategic Closure

It should be clear that no significant program can be 100% closed. For example, consider what would happen to the DrawAllShapes function from Listing 2 if we decided that all Circles should be drawn before any Squares. The DrawAllShapes function is not closed against a change like this. In general, no matter how “closed” a module is, there will always be some kind of change against which it is not closed. Since closure cannot be complete, it must be strategic. That is, the designer must choose the kinds of changes against which to close his design. This takes a certain amount of prescience derived from experience. The experienced designer knows the users and the industry well enough to judge the probability of different kinds of changes. He then makes sure that the open-closed principle is invoked for the most probable changes.

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