This program was originally written in VB3 in October 2007. As an exercise for this old dog to teach himself some new tricks, I decided to re-program the application in Java. There are many advantages in converting it to Java - it needs no installation by the user, no permanent storage on the user's machine, does not read or write any user files, will run on a Mac, and the package is much smaller and more efficient. A user can run the program simply by clicking a link on a web page.
I encountered a few disadvantages too and this is a short report describing those I encountered in writing this particular application. (My conclusions really irritated a number of contributors to the "New to Java" Sun forum, and they were so rude to me that the moderator has removed many of the messages from that topic.)
The first time you use the applet it will take a few seconds to load as it includes a UK gazetteer. Subsequent visit to this page in your same browser session should however be quite fast.