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I have found a situation where I need a pointer like C++ but in JAVA. I'm going to explain the exactly situation so someone can help me:

I'm developing a videogame. In it, there are some chest which give you some items. The amount of items you have is saved in a general object which it's not important. The case is that I want to create just one generic chest object in which I can indicate to it which object is going to give to the player, and when you open it, then it will sum the quantity in the generic object. The problem is that I don't want to use a huge switch inside the chest object in where I check which kind of object is going to sum up. Instead of it, I want to give to the object a pointer to the Integer of the generic object to sum it easily.

Is this possible in JAVA? If not... any tip to do it in an easy way? Thanks!

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    Pointers to objects are not very useful as the location of an object can change at any time without warning. Commented Dec 30, 2012 at 20:14

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Make the player's inventory (presumably the "non-important general object") dynamic instead of storing everything as separate fields. For instance, use a map from the item type identifier to the count, and instead of storing a "pointer" to the count, store the item type identifier in your chest object and use that to increment the correct count in the inventory.

If you absolutely must store everything in separate fields, make them objects instead of plain integers that have getCount/setCount methods. Then pass that object to your chest instead. But if you do that, you'll likely need a big switch anyways to pass the chest the correct object when it's first instantiated.

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I guess I'll try the map way. I wanted to do it really simple, but I suppose I need more things I thought.
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I cannot really say I understood what your requirement is (English is not my mother language) but it seems to me that interfaces are what you are looking for. Back to your question, there are some tweaks that allow developers to access non-JVM memory in direct mode (heap memory). See Apache DirectMemory for more information.

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