Calling a DLL from an Applet via JNI

You can definitely accomplish this. I have a working applet in production that does exactly this. Even if your applet is signed, you still need to use the Access Controller to access the dll, you cannot just call "loadlibrary". You can add this to the Java policy file however this is not recommended due to 1. You probably do not have access to the users java configuration. 2. Even if this is for your own company use, managing the policy file is a pain as users will download some JRE and your policy file is either overwritten or ignored.

You best bet is to sign your jar, making sure to wrap your load library code in a privileged block of code like this.

try
{
    AccessController.doPrivileged(new PrivilegedAction()
    {
        public Object run()
        {
            try
            {
                // privileged code goes here, for example:
                System.load("C:/Program Files/.../Mydll.dll");
                return null; // nothing to return
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                System.out.println("Unable to load Mydll");
                return null;
            }
        }
     });
}
catch (Exception e)
{
    System.out.println("Unable to load Mydll");
}

You can Also use System.loadlibrary(mydll.dll) but you have to have the dll folder on the path in windows so the applet can find it.

If you need some source samples for calling the JNI functions let me know I can grab that as well.