Introduction to Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4

The Java 2 Standard Edition has seen many positive moves for creating professional games with the release of J2SE 1.4. The ability of full-screen exclusivity means that you can now make full-screen games, whereas in earlier editions programmers were forced to fake full-screen mode. This simply entailed removing a window's decorations and sizing it to the dimensions of the screen. This technique obviously has none of the real advantages of full-screen exclusivity. With the new full-screen mode, you can take advantage of such things as page flipping and switching display modes, just like DirectX can do. Another important new feature to J2SE 1.4 is hardware-accelerated graphics, making your graphics processing run at great speed. There has also been an improvement on the networking side of things with the introduction of NIO (New IO), as is discussed in Chapter 18 (in a galaxy far, far away).

It is important to note that throughout the lifetime of the Java Standard Edition, the aspect of backward compatibility is maintained to ensure that programs compiled using older versions of Java (e.g., 1.1, 1.2, 1.3) will still run on the latest JVM. However, the internal implementations can change, become defunct, and are said to be deprecated, which means that they are still in existence to support older code but should not be used for whatever reason; in general they have been found to be unsafe. Don't worry though; when compiling your code, you will be alerted if you are using something that is deprecated.