Installing and Configuring Java

As you might have guessed, Java applet games run in a web browser—Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox work equally well for running Java games. Java programs can also run on a desktop system locally without going to a website. These types of programs are called Java applications and require the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to be installed. The web browser runtime is not the same as the desktop application runtime, which must be installed.

When you install Java Standard Edition 6 (Java SE 6), the runtime includes an update for web browsers automatically. So if you write a Java game using features from Java SE 6, the runtime might need to be updated on an end user’s PC before it will run the game properly. In some cases, the compiled Java program (which ends up being a file with an extension of .class or .jar) will run on older versions of Java, because some updates to the Java language have no impact on the resulting compiled files.