Introduction

You should be careful to check that your unzipping program has named the files correctly. Some DOS programs will name according to the old 8.3 format, rename .class files "*.cla".

The Gallery Example

There is NOTHING to pay. The applet is completely free. However, if you make a donation ($5 - $10?) to Ty Hafan, Children's Hospice of Wales, which is a charitable appeal formed to build, equip and run a Children's Hospice in Wales to provide care for terminally ill children, you can consider your applet well-and-truly registered. Click here for details on how to make a donation. They now have an excellent new OnLine donation page. In just a few minutes you can change a few old, crinkly, dirty little bank notes into a nice warm glow...

Troubleshooting

Why won't the applet work off my hard disk?

Some web browsers have trouble opening applets straight from a hard disk. I have noticed this happen with Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape 4. Once you have loaded the class file and the web page onto your web site you should find it works OK.

Why does my web page say "Class Format Error"?

Class files are binary files, just like image files are. Binary files contain more information than text (also known as ASCII) files do. If you transfer class files as if they were ASCII files then they will lose this extra information and will become corrupted. How do you transfer class files as binary files? You should transfer them in the same way that you transfer image files.

Why does my web page say "Class Not Found"?

This is a very common problem. It may be because of one of the following:

1. You have not put the class file onto the web site
2. You are not calling the file with the correct name (rename to use the same combination of upper- and lower-case letters as your class file)
3. Your transfer program has changed the name. This does happen. Some programs will shorten the ".class" extension to ".cla". Other will change the case of the letters to either all uppercase or all lowercase. See if you can change the options on the transfer program to stop it doing this.
4. You have include a "codebase=…" clause inside your <applet…> code in your web page. "codebase=…" tells the browser to look some place else for the class file.
5. Some other reason I haven't thought of :-)

Examples from the Web

Tutorials

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Til hest!

Linking to my site

If you use this applet then it would be nice if you gave me a link by copying the image:

(this is the file "dglogo.gif" in the .zip archive) into the same directory as your web page and then pasting the following into your page.

<a href="http://www.spigots.com/spigots.htm" target="_top"> <img src="dglogo.gif" width=88 height=31 border=0></a>

It will put a little button on your page that will link through to my Java Spigots page.

It is only a request: feel free to omit it.

Transferring files
Remember that if you are transferring the .class file to another machine with FTP, you should set the 'binary' mode on. Failure to do so will corrupt the file and give rise to a "Class Format" error.

Contacting Me

If you still have trouble getting the applet to work and you have tried all of the possible solutions listed above, then feel to contact me, remembering to include:

1	.	A precise description of the problem (do you just get a grey rectangle, or an error message etc. etc.)
2	.	The URL of the page containing the applet (that's the actual page - not just the front page on your site)

These two pieces of information will make it a lot easier for me to solve the problem. I cannot guarantee that I will be able to respond to all messages (there's only so many hours in the day...) but sending the URL of a page that doesn't work will greatly increase the chances of getting an answer.

Remember to keep a look out at my web site for new applets.

David Griffiths,

19/05/2000