[Advanced-java] Applets: workaround for missing classes in MSIE?

Fri Apr 21 02:59:35 PDT 2006

Hello,

I have a small multiplayer card game applet
( http://preferans.de )  which I try to keep runnable both by
the Sun's JVM and by the old MSIE VM (msjavax86.exe).

There is however one little thing which I'd like to add to it
w/o breaking it for MSIE users: the antialiased fonts.

So I've created this small test case - Anti.java:

import java.awt.*;
import java.applet.*;

public class Anti extends Applet {
	public void init() {
		setFont(new Font("Serif", Font.ITALIC, 36));
	}

	void enableAntiAlias(Graphics g) {
		((Graphics2D) g).setRenderingHint(
		    RenderingHints.KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING,
		    RenderingHints.VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON);
		((Graphics2D) g).setRenderingHint(
		    RenderingHints.KEY_RENDERING,
		    RenderingHints.VALUE_RENDER_QUALITY);
	}

	public void paint(Graphics g) {
/*
		if (System.getProperty("java.vendor").startsWith("Microsoft"))
			System.err.println("MSIE detected");
		else
			enableAntiAlias(g);
*/
		g.drawString("Hello World!", 10, getSize().height / 2);
	}
}

And here is the html-file for your convenience:

<HTML>
<BODY>
<APPLET CODE="Anti" HEIGHT="100" WIDTH="300">
</APPLET>
</BODY>
</HTML>

If I comment the 4 lines in the paint() as listed above,
then MSIE loads and displays the applet w/o problems.

However once I remove the comments, I get this error:

Microsoft (R) VM for Java, 5.0 Release 5.0.0.3810
==============================================
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: java.awt.Graphics2D
	at com/ms/vm/loader/URLClassLoader.loadClass
	at java/lang/ClassLoader.loadClassInternal
	at Anti.paint
	at com/ms/awt/WComponentPeer.doClearAndPaint
	at com/ms/awt/WComponentPeer.paintNode
	at com/ms/ui/windowmanager/PaintRequest.run
	at com/ms/ui/windowmanager/RunnableMessage.run
	at com/ms/awt/WSystemQueue.getMessage
	at com/ms/awt/WEventQueue.getNextEvent
	at java/awt/EventDispatchThread.run

I wonder if anyone have found a nice workaround for this
probably very frequent problem.

Please note, that I don't want to use JS or "Anti.cab"
or teach my users how to install the Sun's VM.
I just want them to play my little game with any browser.

Regards
Alex