NickPick said:
Could you please test my applet? I heard from some people that they
can't load it and I'm trying to find the reason as it works fine on my
computer.
http://www.dickreuter.com/res1.php
many thanks
It works after the user accepts the signed content. If they don't
accept, they will get a security exception. AFAIK there is no browser
setting that automatically denies signed content.(We sell a product that
uses signed applets so I'm pretty sure we would have run across it if it
existed.)
If you want troubleshoot failures:
1. Ask the user if they get a little coffee cup icon in the lower right
hand corner of their screen (presuming Windows).
2. If no, they have a missing or other JRE problem.
3. If yes, have them right click on the coffee cup, open the console and
copy and paste the exceptions into an email to you.
Whether the user accepts the content has more to do with their trust in
you rather than their trust in a Certificate Authority. If it's people
that you know and / or with whom you've created a real or virtual
relationship, you can probably explain the self signed applet upfront
and have them accept it. If you don't have a relationship, you'll
probably need a CA signed cert.
We sell certs on our site (GlobalSign) at (AFAIK) the lowest prices
available. Unfortunately, of the three Java cert issuers, only Verisign
will issue to individuals and they're the most expensive - about $500
for a year. The others, including ours, only issue to registered businesses.
The poster who suggested contacting your server and having it contact
the data generating server seems to have the best workaround. Unless you
need access to the client's system (usually for writing to disk) you
really don't need to sign.
I'd probably have a servlet get the data every x minutes and save it to
a DB and then have the applets connect to a JSP or servlet that reads
from the DB.