Summary

It's safe to say that the Java language is heading in a positive direction for games development with the new features in J2SE 1.4 discussed in this chapter. Let's hope it becomes a force to be reckoned with in the future. The true advantage of Java is its platform independence; as Java becomes more powerful for games development, we may see game companies turning to Java as the development language of choice, with the end goal that development could be a one-time event, running immediately on any system with an up-to-date Java Virtual Machine, even consoles. But this we shall leave blowing in the wind. In the next chapter we will look at reading mouse and keyboard events in Java, paying particular attention to integration into the main loop and thread safety issues along the way.