Quote:Original post by Aldacron
There are a great many web applications which use Applets as one type of user interface via HTTP tunneling. This is especially useful for projects which also have standalone clients since it enables a great deal of code reuse. Applets aren't great for mass market consumption, no, but they are useful for, and are used for, much more than "fluffy" games.

I know that... I wrote it this *harsh* to address the guy who first mentioned them. It seemed that to him applets where an appliable solution to almost anything... which is not true, as you might know.

In a world of Java Server Faces and Ajax, applets can be easily dispensable, depending on your design or requirements. Nonetheless, good practices and good use of their features can result in amazing apps, I do agree.

Rodrigo

Quote:Except that this is a 'game development forum' and in that context applets are usually insufficient for anything more than card/puzzle/2d sprite (fluffy) GAMES. (Of course there HAVE been more than a few successful 'Fluffy' games.)

I realize this is a game development forum. My post makes no distinction about any sort of industry. My point is that applets have found use and do find use. There's absolutely no reason why they can't find use with games. The only real hurdle is JRE market penetration, but that's only a factor depending on your target market. For mass market consumption, maybe not a hot idea, but for a particular segment of that mass market there is great potential.

I also disagree with the idea that applets are only good for those game types you mention. Things have changed since 1996. Both JOGL and LWJGL have support for applets. Both APIs allow native access to OpenGL on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Imagine that you decide to create a 3D Java desktop game using one of the APIs. Once it's done, your code will run on all three platforms without change. The only thing that requires any extra effort is packaging an installer for each platform. You decide to have both a demo and a full version of the game. But rather than providing the demo as a download, you decide to make it an applet instead. Users will be able to play the demo right on your website and you don't have to change any game code or assets beyond a few lines of code to make the game run as an applet and whatever configuration changes you need to differentiate the demo and full versions. When you start thinking of ways to incorporate the game with your website via Servlets, even more possibilites open.

Java has a lot of potential that no one has tapped yet in the game industry. We are already seeing some great Indie games using Java, but nothing that really takes advantage of some of the language's unique features. Since fluffy applets are the only applets we have really seen to date (other than Runescape), I can understand why people have the impression that they aren't good for much else. That will start to change once we see some fancy 3D applets using LWJGL or JOGL.

I think the indie games space is where Java can really shine, both in terms of game development and tools development. The Eclipse Rich Client Platform is just screaming for someone to come along and develop a robust multi-editor environment for a game engine. There's a great deal of potential for a collaborative development environment that lets a programmer update his working copy in England and let fellow team members see the results nearly instantaneously in Germany, Canada and Brazil before checking it in to the repository. Such a system could incorporate Servlets, Applets, desktop applications and JSP pages, sharing large amounts of code between them.

There's no reason that Java can't be used successfully in the game industry. It's just that very few have made the attempt.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index

Those are known to be bullshit rankings.

Anon Poster - Personally I take lessons from the game dev world back to my day job in the business app development world... and back again. All the time. To exclude yourself from different areas of development stunts what you are able to do. Many great inventions are based on taking things from one context and applying them creatively in another.

Do you really think Charles Babbage imagined that computers would be used as toys, for games of war?