Question

I have an applet that runs inside an web application. The applet requires certain jar’s to be signed for its successful running.

So I am signing a few jar files required by the applet and leaving the remaining jar files unsigned or plain in the web-app.

This web application along with the applet runs in a Tomcat container. Does this mix and match presence of self-signed and unsigned jar’s affect the web-application in any way? Does the app show errors or exceptions or does not work due to this?

I tried it and ended up in few other issues. I am not sure if these issues are the outcome of this co-existence of signed and unsigned jar’s or they are independent issues.

Answer 1

The applet should normally run on the client side, and normally only the Java plugin cares whether or not some of the jars are signed or not. Tomcat (which runs on the server side) does not execute the applet code, and thus does not care whether it is signed or not.

Thus, if you get the plugin to accept your partly signed applet, Tomcat should have no problem at all.