JAVA APPLET Surface what is it (technically)?

When creating an "gui" on top of an applet-surface.. most examples i have found - simply start put gui element (on what?) en voila...
Their you have it.. an applet-gui-surface with couple of gui-elements

Question 1: What IS the applet surface actually?
Is it
- a Window?
- a Frame?
- a Panel?
- something else?

Question 2: How can you set (and fix) it height and width? or is this simply not possible?

Thanks for de-mistifying this Applet-Gui-Thing

1) It's generally a javax.swing.JApplet or a java.applet.Applet; either way, it's ultimately a subclass of java.awt.Panel.

2) You can set the size in the HTML; you can't change it afterwards.

Ernest Friedman-Hill wrote:1) It's generally a javax.swing.JApplet or a java.applet.Applet; either way, it's ultimately a subclass of java.awt.Panel.
2) You can set the size in the HTML; you can't change it afterwards.

Thanks Ernest for clearing this up / confirming my test results!
I have experimented with this "strange applet behavior" and created some 20 (AWT and Swing) little ("hello world") applets (with window, frame or panel as "display-surface"basis) + 20 HTML webpages (with and without the "height" and "width" parameters), just to see how the stuff works, by trail and error :-(.

No Java book (i've ready for far) and online Java applet tutorial mentions this strange feature!

So far I've found of that a (J)Frame has properties to:
- .setSize(w,h) its "display_surface" area to a pre-determined height and width
- .setResizable(true.false) to (dis)allow resizing the "display_surface" area

Note:
Funny thing don't you think that Java has no option to pre-fix a application/applet "display area size"??
Or is this "left out" on purpose because Java is designed as a Multi platform and Multi Operating System Programming Language.???

Moving to our Applets forum.