Overview
Applets are used to provide interactive features to web applications that cannot be provided by HTML alone. They can capture mouse input and also have controls like buttons or check boxes. In response to the user action an applet can change the provided graphic content. This makes applets well suitable for demonstration, visualization and teaching. There are online applet collections for studying various subjects, from physics to heart physiology. Applets are also used to create online game collections that allow players to compete against live opponents in real-time.
An applet can also be a text area only, providing, for instance, a cross platform command-line interface to some remote system. If needed, an applet can leave the dedicated area and run as a separate window. However, applets have very little control over web page content outside the applet dedicated area, so they are less useful for improving the site appearance in general (while applets like news tickers or WYSIWYG editors are also known). Applets can also play media in formats that are not natively supported by the browser
HTML pages may embed parameters that are passed to the applet. Hence the same applet may appear differently depending on the parameters that were passed.
As applets have been available before CSS, they were also widely used for trivial effects like navigation buttons. This use is criticized and declining.
Read more about this topic: Java Applet