applets don't work on [insert random browser on device]

http://twitpic.com/8w3xr :)

getting code to work is easy, getting the largest most influential tech companies to cooperate on building a platform for you to deliver applications that work on most devices in the world entirely for free with no real financial incentive.

thats a plain miracle.

No, it's because Applets, like Flash, are a narrow, specific, proprietary setting. Nobody has ever questioned that Java can handle something like that.

The interesting part here is that it is showing that browsers and JavaScript, with a very different approach than Flash or Java, can now handle this sort of computationally intensive, graphics intensive application without any OS-specific plugins.