Reading from .txt files

I'm making an advanced search applet for the publications of a science lab. They only have about 300 so I didn't bother teaching myself SQL, it was easy enough to keep all the info for articles (author, journal, year, etc) in a .txt file that acts as a database.

I first wrote a standalone program that works nicely, but after making an applet version it doesn't run at all - a blank screen comes up when I load the html doc it's embedded in. A bit of digging gave me this error message:

java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.io.FilePermission publications.txt read)

The publications.txt file is kept in the same folder as the applet source code and html document, but I can't access it for some reason. I am using BufferedReader to read the info from it, should I use something else?

Here is the relevant method:

Code:

---

private void buildList () {

    BufferedReader reader;
    articles = new ArrayList<Article>();
    String inputLine;

        try{

            reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("publications.txt"));
            inputLine = reader.readLine();

            while (inputLine != null) {

                Article.process(inputLine, articles); //creates a new Article and adds it to the list
                inputLine = reader.readLine();

            }

            reader.close();

        }catch(IOException e) {

                e.printStackTrace();

        }

}

---

Must this be an applet that is displayed via a web page, or can it be a stand-alone gui such as a JFrame? If it must be delivered via the internet, have you using a JNLP program (though this may not work as well on a Mac with Firefox)? Also, have you considered adding the text file to the jar file?

Yes, it's for the lab's website so it needs to be on the internet. I have not tried jar or JNLP, I am pretty new to Java (1 year experience). I'll look into them and let you know if it works.

Solved my problem using this trick: BrainJar.com: Communicating With the Host

Thanks for sharing your solution!