there are couple of solutions to your problem.

---then they will forward  to another page  which they can do a search  and

---retrive data  which they request  and bring them forward to another
---page

1) U can merge this page with the applet  page so that when the user
makes some selection on the web page, u can store the data in some
hidden form fields and when he clicks on the SEARCH button u can
activate ur applet which picks up the data from the hidden fields and
processes it as per business logic

2) U can have a server side component which listens to the selections
user has made and then it passes these selections as a param values to
the applet thru html

both solutions do work.
let me know if there is any problem