1 Setup

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the Scala programming language, the UNIX command line environment, and HTML (although you can probably get away without knowing HTML if you are okay with a simple web page for your applet). You must also have a place to host the web applet. This tutorial was created using a UNIX system, but I assume that with the proper modifications (i.e. using the appropriate commands), this tutorial can be used to create a Scala web applet that is hosted on other operating systems.

Before we begin, you will need to download a few resources (if you do not already have them). The first is, of course, the Scala programming language, which you can get from www.scala-lang.org. We will use the version of Scala that is build on top of the Java programming language (a version of Scala also exists for the .NET platform, but that version will not be covered in this tutorial). Make sure you know where Scala is installed on your system. We will need to extract files from the Scala directory later in the tutorial. The next resource you will need is Proguard. Proguard is a free Java program that shrinks, optimizes, obfuscates, and preverifies Java (and, by extension, Scala) code. You can download Proguard from proguard.sourceforge.net. Our main purpose for using Proguard is to shrink our applet's jar file in order to reduce the startup time of the applet. If we do not use Proguard, then the jar file would be relatively large and would take a significant amount of time to download while the applet is launching. Download the Proguard file and unzip it into a directory of your choosing. We will come back to this later.