informix universal server java api

The consensus seems to suggest that the best way to take advantage of informix universal server's object-oriented features and extendablilty is with the Informix Java API. Now I have another question. Keep in mind that I am new to Java. We want to write some java applets that people will launch from their web browser. The web browser could be on any computer under any operating system. However the applets need to connect to the database in order to view the data we have. We are building an open and searchable database for neuroscience data. When I ran an example java applet (with appletviewer) from the informix java api programmer's guide, I was required to add something to my LD_LIBRARY_PATH. The applet would not run unless it could find a particular informix shared object library. Now, random users on random computers will certainly not have this library. So can the applet still work? Is the library (libIfmxLibmiNatives.so) only necessary on the server side? Thanks. -MT