Though IE 4.0 is JDK1.1 compliant, it still calls the deprecated JDK1.0
method preferredSize() of components instead of getPreferredSize(). No
you cannot define the actual method in getPreferredSize() and call it from
preferredSize() because internally the two methods are interconnected which
results in an infinite loop. The solution is to define both the methods
with identical body and live with the compile time warning for using deprecated
methods.
You request for a font which is not available with the JVM. Normally you
wouldn't want the JVMs to switch the font family. At least it should not
change a fixed width font to a proportional font. But with IE (4.01) you
can never be sure. It might be possible to tinker around with the font.properties
file to prevent this, but first of all I will have to locate it!
Multithreaded applet. Two threads to process requests and the AWT threads
pushes requests into the processors request queue on action events. After
inserting the request the AWT thread wakes up the processor thread. In
a particular situation an AWT object had two action listeners registered.
The first action listener inserts a request which results in disabling
the component. This causes the JVM to freeze. As always, happens in IE
only (4.01).
The z-order of components added to a panel in Netscape older versions (before
4.0) was reverse of the standard behavior. The new component floats up
instead of sinking down.
You can embed images and configuration files in jar files and use getResource()
to retrieve them. But Netscape considers it as a potential security hole
and does not allow that. They suggest getResourceAsStream() instead. That
does not work in Netscape 4.05 default version which is supposed to be
JDK1.1 enabled.
If a component is not yet added to a container or is not visible, then
some AWT methods like setFocus(), createImage() etc. might fail.
You opened a client socket to a server. If the server closes the socket,
the client won't know about that till it tries to read. Write may go through
without any errors.
If you do not close open sockets before closing IE 4.01 on Win95, IE gives
GPF.
IE does not call stop() and destroy() of an active applet when the browser
window is closed.
Older versions of Netscape call init() multiple times instead of start().
Off screen painting might not be faster on all machines! It is machine
dependent. Also keep in mind that you will be using more memory by maintaining an offscreen image.
Scroll panel on IE 4.0 displays scroll bars even when the component size
is exactly equal to the container size. It should be sufficiently less
than the container size.
It helps a lot to make all un-inherited classes final. If you have lots
of such classes, do this change and watch the performance boost!
Do not rely too much on the java optimizers, at least not at this stage
and not the standard ones. Do as much optimizations as possible yourself.
Use javap to look into the compiled byte code and you will see how an innocent
looking line of code becomes a monster in byte codes.
Do not use too many unnecessary type conversions. Keep all types uniform as
far as possible.
Reuse classes as much as possible. You will be saving calls to the memory
manager, garbage collector, constructor, and god knows what else.
Use short names for packages, methods and classes. The full names are stored
inside the java classes. So the shorter the names, the small are your classes.
Technical Articles