As recently as 3 years ago a customer of mine wanted a Java applet for drag-and-drop/file upload from Outlook. Part of the problem was that Outlook doesn't expo

As recently as 3 years ago a customer of mine wanted a Java applet for drag-and-drop/file upload from Outlook. Part of the problem was that Outlook doesn't expose serialized object data to DnD; it was necessary to call into a special API to get at the attachment data (but MS invented DnD so it can't be called non-standard I guess). However, another difficulty with using browser file upload controls was that, for security reasons, programatically (JavaScript) putting a file to upload is forbidden (readonly form attribute) by the respective browser API spec, so in the end the GUI part had to be coded in the Java/applet, too, when the HTML GUI would have been preferable. So my point is that Java applets in recent years weren't used for GUIs so much as they were used for piercing the browser sandbox, and I don't see a solution for this problem now that applets have gone.