The first "real" Java program I wrote back in 1997 was a huge applet. It was the replacement for an existing X Windows application, with 42 screens. The applet itself worked great, but the networking technology at the time was such that when all the users on a network segment started their browser and launched the applet, it bogged things down to a crawl. Still, when it was loaded it was amazing (for 1997). It looked almost exactly like the original application, and updates were as easy as putting a new jar file onto the web server.