Overview of the programmatic story
This topic should give the "big picture" of what applets are and, in general, what you can do with them programmatically. I envision this overview as having links (shown in bold) to other overview topics that go into more depth for various pieces, such as InfoBus, template-building, calling out to Java code from your HTML file, etc. Here are the points I think the overview needs to cover:
- What are applets? What can you do with them? Why are they so great?
- Which applets does this package contain?
- HTML page as the context for applets (i.e., they live on the HTML page). This may seem obvious, but I think it's worth mentioning.
- End-users can use the InfoCenter to interactively manipulate applet instances.
- You can manipulate applet instances programmatically by setting HTML parameters, using JavaScript to access applet APIs, or calling out toJava code (If we determine we need to document how to incorporate Java code into applet applications).
- First you have to create an instance of an applet class, then you can set parameters.
- To access methods, you need to first instantiate, then obtain a reference to the applet instance, then you can dot into the methods.
- You can build templates and reference them in your HTML file.
- Your applications can contain the InfoCenter. You can also use buttons and other u/i devices to allow the user to interact with the applet.
- Your applications can contain more than one applet, and the applets can communicate with one another or with another data source via the InfoBus or by other means, such as naming a range on a sheet that has the same name as a chart object. Any applet that is registered with the InfoBus can place data on or get data from the InfoBus.