Sun's Chief Gaming Officer - Chris Melissinos

The military needs a mechanism to deliver training applications to any desktop client at any facility in the world. Accomplishing this by installing the right training app on the right computer is totally impractical, and practically impossible. This has to be a pull system that allows the trainee to open or install the necessary applications on the computer that he is sitting at. Web pages are a great model for this, though training applications are more like 3D games is their size and complexity.

Java games delivered via Web Start is one solution to this. It allows the application to be larger and more complex than a typical web page or Flash application. But it also avoids requiring the user to install applications from CD-ROM.

Of course Chris Melissinos, the Chief Gaming Officer for Sun Microsystems, thinks this is a great solution because it uses Sun's Java environment as its foundation. After playing with a number of Java games for entertainment, I tend to agree with him for medium-sized applications (i.e. 1MB to 10MB).

One entertaining example is Tribal Trouble.