I read the Ubuntu Absolute Beginners Forum and found this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=840113&highlight=wordle
which I followed. It didn't seem to work, so I looked on Synaptic
Package Manager for jre and installed all the jre java packages and
restarted the computer. Now I'm up and running.You don't say which
distro you're using - I'm on Ubuntu 9.10. If you're not using Ubuntu,
you might still find the forums useful. All the best, A.