SCEA I -- Legacy Connectivity

To my understanding, applets cannot defined native method. However, applets can access legacy systems by calling native methods. Am I right?

A lot of this depends on the browser.
Did the applet get delivered in a signed jar file and your browser is configured to trust code from the signer of the file?
Now you say you want to run a native method in this applet. Well are you trying to run on Windows, Linux, or Macintosh?
The point being that this is going to be hard to implement unless it's on a small scale and maybe an intranet.
So why would you want to run a native method in an applet?
Generally you want to run a native method via JNI over an RMI connection. I believe Ian's mock goes into this. Recently there was a thread where a number of people expressed opinions about this issue. Many thought CORBA was a better solution than RMI.
HTH...