An applet is slang for "small application". Applets are usually downloaded from a website and run from within a web browser during the session where the user is browsing the website. To run an applet, the browser must be using some sort of plug-in or runtime virtual machine such as Adobe Flash, Sun Java, Microsoft Silverlight or Microsoft Active-X. Your web browser must have the appropriate plugins installed and enabled to run applets. Browser plugins make the browser smarter and enable it to run applets that let you view Flash applets or run Java applications in your web browser. This is called 'extending' the capabilities of the web browser. Applets extend the functions available within the browser from within the web page where they are downloaded. Usually, the extended functionality is only available during the browsing session to the website from which the applet was downloaded. Applets are written by a programmer, stored at the web server, embedded in a web page by the webmaster and downloaded by the user's web browser when a particular page is loaded. The Applet is usually not reusable between different websites, so any applet you download from one website is likely to only work when loading pages from that site.
Applets