The HotMedia toolkit includes a Java-applet player. Rather than creating a single large applet player, HotMedia breaks the player down into very small Java objects, each of which is around 10Kbytes in size.
When a web-browser encounters a HotMedia content on a page, it starts downloading the HotMedia file and the associated HotMedia Java-applet. The HotMedia applet reads the contents of the file and automatically determines which player-objects the user needs and fetches them over the network -- resulting in a cascade of Java-objects being delivered from the server.
Once a Java object is sent to the browser, it often remains in the browser's cache for the entire session, so subsequent content will play even more quickly. The content determines its own behavior and signals which applets the user needs and when they are needed.
This section will help you understand how applets are downloaded, as well as show you how to insert applets into your HTML code.