Question

I need to open an external window from a Java applet. How can I do it without making the window a child of the applet? I need the window to stay open even when the applet is closed. I know it can be done. Bang! Howdy does exactly what I’m trying to achieve.

http://www.banghowdy.com/launch.html

Answer 1

It looks like Bang! Howdy has the applet download all necessary files and then launches a seperate process to run the application. If you check out the logs of the Java Console, you’ll see a bunch of download statements, and then at the end the call to launch the application.

2009/06/15 07:24:12:484 INFO C.a: Running C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe
  -classpath
  C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang\code\config.jar;C:\Documents and Settings\usere\Application Data\bang\code\bang-config.jar;C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang\code\bang-pcode.jar;C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang\code\lwjgl.jar;C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang\code\lwjgl_util.jar;C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang\code\commons-beanutils.jar;C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang\code\commons-digester.jar;C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang\code\commons-logging.jar
  -Xmx256M
  -Djava.library.path=C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang/native
  -Dappdir=C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang
  -Dresource_dir=C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\bang/rsrc
  com.threerings.bang.client.BangApp

You may also want to look into Java WebStart, it does much the same thing.