What can be done in Java?

Question

I wonder what is relistic to do in java?
Im thinking mainly in terms of games... As I understand it, Java aplications are not the fastest due to the "runtime translation" the JVC does... (hope I've got that right, otherwise: please correct me!)
By still how much does this affect the speed of the program?
What is possible to do?
and one more thing... I've just finished a basic course in java but I feel I lack some of the english terminology (the course was not in english), so if anyone know where I can read about that, internet or not, I would be greateful!
Best regards John!

Answer 1

Robin,
Not bad. I laughed, for a few seconds. ;) Actually, you do make a valid point though. Swing as applet games are just fine for most kids up until they get into the big x-box and ps2 games. But most games can be written in Java that target a large range of young kids even up to games like crossword puzzles and such. I would even say that Swing is probably fast enough for most "old time" games like Pacman, Dig Dug, Galaxian, and such. I would bet that with JDK 1.4 and a 1Ghz machine you could get suffecient update times in the GUI to handle decently sized windows with icon animation, so long as you are not repainting the entire screen 30+ times a second. Even then it may be possible. Eclipse does very well when scrolling the editor even in full screen. If you take advantage of the full screen mode JDK 1.4 introduced you could even write very good mid-level 3D games and such, although I would be it will be hard to get anything better than a Quake or Unreal (old) engine performance compared to today's top notch engines. I don't know for sure though. I still argue that most of these applications use timing to handle updates and syncronization. I don't know if they rely on hardware timing through the video card and/or sound card, or if they are able to use low-level system timers. I know a lot of real-time audio apps get great performance only through GSIF or ASIO drivers which are hardware specific to sound cards, which would provide their own ASIO or GSIF drivers that work with their hardware.
That is my one big wish list for JDK 1.x or maybe even 2.0. Having a solid tie in with hardware level devices in some consistat cross-platform manner. I wish there were API's that allowed a direct access route probably through JNI that was part of the JDK for hardware access, so that applications could be written to access scanners, printers, USB devices, FireWire, various ports, and drivers like video and soundcard drivers in such a way that we could tap into them for just about any purpose. I think for multi-media applications, video at 30fps and keeping in sync with audio updates for mixing audio and midi might be possible with decent GUI updates from Swing. The killer is the timing resolution which as far as I know is impossible to achieve 1ms or lower timing in Java. Hell, most OSs can't guarantee that resolution without the support of dedicated hardware, even though every computer has nanosecond timing capabilities. If the OS doesn't make it available, you either have to provide a driver at the kernel level or before that level in the OS, or rely on a hardware map to a soundcard or some other timing device to achieve that resolution. When Java can get into this in a consistent manner for any platform, or even just provide an API that doesn't guarantee resolution of timing, but that a timer would be called, or that hardware could be accessed, then we would gain some really strong Java capabilities!