It is really too bad that at some point in the last 18 years of Java VMs being in browsers that they didn't formalize the connection between the DOM and Java so that you could write code that interacted directly with the DOM and vice/versa in a mature VM that was already included. Would have been way better than applets, way faster than Javascript and relatively easy to implement. The browsers actually have (had?) APIs for this but they were never really stabilized.