An applet can find other applet either by looking up by its name (using the AppletContext getApplet() method) or by finding all the applets present on the page (by using AppletContext getApplets() method). Both methods, if are successful, give the caller one or more applet objects. Once if the caller finds an Applet object, it can invoke methods on the object.

This section gives the code that Sender uses to look up an applet by its name. Here is the Sender program

The Sender goes to make sure that Receiver was found and that it is an instance of correct class (Receiver). If everything goes well, then Sender sends a message to the Receiver. Here is the Receivers program.

A getApplets() method returns the list (an Enumeration ) of all the applets on present in the page. For the security purpose, many browsers and the applet viewers implement the getApplets() method so that it will return only those applets which are originated from the same host as the applet calling getApplets(). Here is an applet that simply lists all the applets it finds on the page:

Many of the Applets and AppletContext methods involves some sort of the communication with a browser or applet viewer. Consider for example, Applet getDocumentBase() and getCodeBase() methods get the information browser or applet viewer where the applet and the HTML page came from. The method Applet showStatus() tells the browser or the viewer to display a status message. The Applets getParameterInfo() method can give a browser the list of parameters an applet understands. And, of course the browser or the applet viewer calls up Applet init, start, stop, and destroy methods to inform a applet of the changes in its state. Two other interesting methods are AppletContext showDocument() methods

Applets, like any other Java programs, can make use of the API defined in the java.net package to communicate across the network. Here the only difference is that, for security reasons, the only host with which an applet can communicate is the host from which it was delivered.