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I'm familiar with applets, but hadn't heard of Java Web Start. Could Java Web Start interact with the DOM?

Not really, Java Web Start essentially provided a way to download a fully-capable Java application running on normal JVM, from a click on website.

It's been used in place of applets a lot, but mostly because you could provide a complex application that opened in a new window with a click (assuming you dealt with the CA shenanigans).

It couldn't interact with DOM unless it accessed a browser over something like COM.

I worked on an app that was using Java Web Start still, as of January 2023. It was a problem, because JWS was not included in the parts of Java that were open-sourced, and was not available as part of recent OpenJDK versions of Java. Some open source JWS implementations exist, when I left that job though, the situation had still not been resolved in terms of finding a JWS replacement. It was imperative that we get off Oracle Java because of their expensive upcoming licensing changes. I wonder what ever happened..........

It's now possible to run Java Web Start applications fully in the browser without any plugins: https://cheerpj.com/cheerpj-jnlp-runner/

It's based on CheerpJ, a JVM that runs in the browser (using JS and Wasm).

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