A portable AWT/Swing architecture for Java game development

Abstract

Recently, the performance of Java platforms has been greatly improved to satisfy the requirements for game development. However, the rendering performance of Java 1.1, which is still used by about one-third of current Web browser users, is not sufficient for high-profile games. Therefore, practically, Java game developers, especially those who use applets, have to take this into consideration in most environments. In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a portable window toolkit architecture called the CYC Window Toolkit (CWT) with the ability to: (1) reach high rendering performance particularly in Java 1.1 applications and applets when using DirectX to render widgets in CWT; (2) support AWT/Swing compatible widgets, so hence the CWT can be easily applied to existing Java games; (3) define a general architecture that supports multiple graphics libraries such as AWT, DirectX and OpenGL, multiple virtual machines such as Java VM and NET CLR, and multiple operating systems (OSs) such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and UNIX-based OSs; (4) provide programmers with one-to-one mapping APIs to directly manipulate DirectX objects and other game-related properties. The CWT has also been applied to an online Java game system to demonstrate the proposed architecture. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.