The Borrowers
By Al Williams
The Internet has long been a place where borrowing is an accepted practice, although generally on an informal basis. When you link to a page, you are -- to some degree -- borrowing its contents. Who among us hasn't found a neat icon or background or other design element on the Web and borrowed it for our own pages? Indeed, many sites exist simply to make reusable items available for us to borrow.
Borrowing need not be limited to graphics, of course; if you look, you'll find many Java applets on the Web that you can use on your own pages. Given the choice, most Web developers would rather borrow an existing applet than write a new one from scratch, if only to save time. However, sometimes you won't be able to find an applet that does what you want -- or more likely, you'll find an applet that almost does what you want, but misses the mark by just a bit. If this is the case, do you really have to start over from scratch? Perhaps, but perhaps not.
One Applet, Hold the Source
Source code is included with many of the applets you'll find on the Web, so you might be able to change the applet's source code for your purposes. Even if source code isn't included, there are some tools that you can use to attempt to reconstruct source code from a class file. However, the reconstruction is usually imperfect. Besides, some authoring tools modify class files to foil attempts at reconstruction. This whole process raises sticky legal questions that many of us would rather sidestep, so we won't discuss that option.<>
