Sure, you could do it with an applet or a servlet easily enough. But applets
and servlets are rather different animals.

I suspect that you don't know enough about Java to know which you would
prefer to use. Perhaps it would be best if you could explain more about what
you want to do so that someone could advise you on the best approach. Then,
I'm sure someone could suggest examples or tutorials that would help you. It
would be especially useful to know what you are going to do with the
information you get from the text box.

It would also be VERY helpful if you gave some information about what you
already know about Java and programming in general. If you've never written
a program in any language, you'll find that even a trivial Java program will
be quite a challenge. If you are already a fluent programmer in one or more
languages, you probably won't find it hard to learn the basics of Java and
write your program.

--
Rhino