An applet is an extension of Panel... so you can add it to a Frame to make a stand alone application... however, some of the functionality of the applet class is not available, such as the URL, AppletContext, etc... so you can use some code like the following to
test your applet out in an application environment, but you may need to add some changes to make it work correctly...
Not sure if this exactly answers what you wanted... since you could just run the applets in appletviewer to make an applet "run like an application"... but if this helps, great... if not, please try to explain in more detail what you are trying to do...
HTH,
-Nate