A user asked to have Java 1.3 installed on his linux workstation. Suspicious of a request for a 5 year old version of Java I stopped by the requester's cube to learn more.
It turned out that one of the companies we were working with provided access to a custom application via a Tarantella setup. Tarantella is a terminal services platform (think VNC or Citrix), and while the web/java client for this particular version of the Tarantella server would load with a modern Java runtime, the application wasn't actually usable because of screen redrawing issues. The user was told that he should use a 1.3 release of Java from Sun.
It of course would have been my preference to tell this company to get with the times (after cursing the creators of Java for the fact that I seem to have more negative experiences with Java than positive ones). But as that was not an option, I went to work out how to have multiple versions of Java available to a browser under linux.
While investigating the feasibilty of this (short answer: While doable under Windows, the solution under linux involves multiple copies of a web browser). It dawned upon me that there was likely a locally installable client that could connect to the server. A quick email to the company hosting the Tarantella server we were trying to connect to got me a copy of the program and I was able to close requestor's bug ticket.
