www.uk.map24.com

Map 24 provide interactive street maps, complete with searching by address, points of interest and full directions, using an applet.

They presented a very good technical session on applets at last year's JavaOne, where I seem to remember that they said they are one of the most popular applet sites and are responsible for a lot for the JRE download traffic that Sun gets.

Try it out - the applet loads very quickly, is very fast at rendering maps and very responsive to use, so it's a great example to use to dispel the 'applets are slow' myth.

www.uk.map24.com

swinglabs.java.sun.com/iris

IRIS (Interactive Rich Imaging Software) was one of the most impressive demos at last year's JavaOne conference. It mixes applets with AJAX to provide a photo viewer and editing tool that connects to Flickr to allow you to see slideshows, edit photos and upload photos to your Flickr account.

I'm not certain about the division of labour between the applet and JavaScript, but I'm fairly sure that the applet is handling most of the communications as well as the 3D graphics (via JOGL).

The slideshow transitions are nicely done.

http://swinglabs.java.sun.com/iris/ (requires Java 6 to run)

www.j2e.com

just2easy provides a full WYSYWYG word processor in an applet, providing the usual text formatting and layout, as well as automatically giving each document you create a unique URL so it can be viewed by anyone with a browser.

www.j2e.com

www.upnext.com

This is a really impressive applet based website that allows you to fly around New York, like Google Earth, but also allows you to see details about businesses and buildings, post reviews of places and read others' reviews. I like the ability to click on individual buildings - very cool.

I hope they extend it to include other cities soon.

www.upnext.com