Macintosh Application Environment for Java is a full GUI for Java Applets that I developed before Sun released Swing. At the time, AWT was the only option, and quite frankly it was absolutely awful. At the time, back in 1997, everyone was talking about how NCs (Network Computers) were the future (that is more than 15 years befor the first Chromebook) and I wanted to be able to design rich applications that could work in a browser. Unfortunately, HTML was not yet a viable option and Java applets seemed a good option.
I must say that working on MAE was quite fun and it gave me a complex project on which to sharpen my Java skills. Today MAE looks quite dated (the look and feel was based on classic Mac OS) but at the time, this was cutting edge.