Introduction - JavaTech: An Introduction to Scientific and Technical Computing with Java - page 23

The appletviewer program doesn't require that a file be a legitimate HTML
file, only that it contains the applet tags. You can then run the applet with
> appletviewer HelloWorld.java
To reduce space, we don't show the applet tags section in the applet code
listings in the topic but it appears in all the downloadable code at the Web
Course.
1.9 Changes in Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0
We mentioned in Section 1.3 that Sun is introducing a new version of the language
called Java 5.0. Most of the changes fall into the ease of development category.
With a few important exceptions, the changes do not add new functionality but
rather provide an easier way of doing the same things you could do before but
with less code and better compiler-time error detection. We provide here a brief
rundown of the most important changes to the platform.
1.9.1 Major themes in 5.0 Development
Release 5.0 revolves around five major themes:
Quality, stability, and compatibility - The designers of J2SE 5.0 considered quality,
stability, and compatibility to be the most important aspect of the new release. Release 5.0
is the most tested release ever. Great efforts were made to ensure compatibility with
previous versions of Java. The Sun engineers have made a public plea for users world-
wide to test their code with the 5.0 Beta releases and report any problems that appear,
especially any code that works with earlier versions of Java but fails under 5.0.
Performance and scalability -Faster JVM startup time and smaller memory footprint
were important goals. These have been achieved through careful tuning of the software
and use of class data sharing. (Refer to http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/
docs/guide/vm/class-data-sharing.html for more information about class
data sharing and why it helps.)
Ease of Development - Most of us take the first two themes for granted. We expect
quality, stability, and compatibility, and the performance and scalability enhancements
are very nice to have. We applaud the extensive efforts Sun has made in those areas.
However, the Ease of Development (EoD) theme and the two that follow are likely to
be the most important changes noticed by developers.
It is in the EoD area that the most significant changes appear. In most cases, no
new functionality was added in the sense that almost anything you can do with 5.0 you
could do with 1.4, it just sometimes took a lot more boilerplate code (i.e. code that is
repeated frequently) to do it. The exception to this general statement has to do with
the new multithreading and concurrency features that provide capabilities previously
unavailable.