Signing an Applet easiest way!

Can anyone help me to create a signed applet as I have gone through a lot of the java documentation but alot of it seems to be for SDK 1.1 and the tools are now EOL.

I just want to create an applet that is allowed to use the network connection functionality in the URLConnection class to write a small program to check whether a weblink is down or not.

the one guide i did find showed how this could be achieved using the server to handle these requests however ideally I would just like to sign the applet

[525 byte] By [canardo80a] at [2007-9-29 21:39:48]