The Java start button displays a menu of Java programs that can be downloaded and run from the internet just by selecting them in the menu.  They run in a single Java Virtual Machine so they start instantly and take very little memory compared to normal Java programs.


The screenshot shows an early version of the menu with only a few applications listed - obviously there's enough apps out there for educational and games to be separate categories!  The application list is updated from the internet though so it can always have the latest Java applications listed in it.

The Java Start Button uses a sweet multi-threaded downloader that gets several resources at once and does load-balancing, so even if a huge program with many resources is downloading you can still start up small programs very fast.


The core of the program is a Java Network Launching Protocol (JNLP) client called netx.  It can be included in any program to load Java code into a virtual machine and run it in a secure environment with process management (dispose windows and stop threads when application exits).

To run the Java Start Button you can open it with Java Web Start, or download the netx JNLP client and open the link using that.  Java Start Button requires JRE 1.3 or later to run.