The JavaTalk FAQ
This is not a quick substitute for the JavaTalk documentation. In fact, answers on this page assume that you've already gone through the readme.txt (which you can find at http://badges.orl.co.uk/~fms/javatalk/readme.txt ) without finding the answer. If you haven't done so yet, please look in there first. The Javatalk page can be found at http://badges.orl.co.uk/~fms/javatalk/ . IMPORTANT NOTE: if you mail me about any of this stuff, please ensure that you have a valid return address! It's so frustrating for me to spend time composing a reply and then seeing that it bounces back.
Q: My provider lets me upload pages and classes for my WWW page, but I can't run programs. Can I still run JavaTalk on my page?
A: This is probably the most frequent question I get. The simple answer is, unfortunately, no. To have your own chat page completely under your control you must run your own server, and to run the server you must execute the Java interpreter on the WWW server machine.
Q: Yes but I really want to. What else can I do?
A: There is a way around this, which is to use the applet and server from another site (for example mine), but I don't recommend it, so I won't give you detailed instructions. Don't take this as a challenge -- it's a trivial thing to do, just change the HTML to point at another site, anybody can figure it out. The disadvantage is that your friends, which are presumably much nearer to you than to me in net terms, will all have to load the applet from my site and talk to the server on my site, without even realizing it, while they are chatting on your page. This will make the chat feel inexplicably a lot slower than it normally is, leading to quick frustration of those involved and to bad publicity for poor JavaTalk. Of course, because the server isn't run by you, you won't be able to mail them the transcript afterwards. Another important disadvantage is that the server may go down at unexpected times without any warning to you (e.g. there is a terrible thunderstorm here that shuts down the electricity to the whole building -- it happened a couple of months ago) and, while I give out JavaTalk for free, I can make no promises about keeping up the server at all times. It would be better, in this case, to simply put a link from your page to my JavaTalk page, and to tell your friends that you should meet there for a chat at such-and-such a time every evening: at least it would be obvious that you're using a remote facility.
Q: The server I use doesn't have a Java interpreter. Where do I get one?
A: If your system isn't one of the mainstream ones as far as Java is concerned, I probably don't know. However, at the time of writing, good starting points include: http://www.javasoft.com/ (for SPARC/Solaris, x86/Solaris, MS-Windows 95/NT, and MacOS), ftp://java.blackdown.org/pub/Java/linux/ and http://nova.cc.nthu.edu.tw/docs/linux/howto/Java/Java-HOWTO.html (for Linux). If you know of other sites supporting any more operating systems, let me know and I'll add the info here. It's also always worth checking any Java faqs you can find, and/or searching with http://www.altavista.digital.com/ with appropriate keywords.
Q: Do I have to install the JavaTalkServer in a particular directory?
A: No. You can put it wherever you like.
Q: The client seems to initialize itself ok, but then I get a null pointer exception. Why?
A: The most frequent cause for this is that the server your applet is trying to talk to is not actually running. To check whether JavaTalkServer is running properly or not, try "telnet www.yoursite.com 6764", substituting those arguments with the ones you have in the page that contains the applet. If the server is running, you'll get the JavaTalkServer banner and whatever you type in the telnet window will be echoed back to you. If this isn't working, the applet isn't going to work either until you first sort out the server.
Formatted by makefaq v. 1.2 of 1996/09/10 by Frank Stajano, (c) Olivetti Research Limited