17.8. Using Drawing Techniques

Having learned to walk, let's try a jog. In this section, we'll look at some techniques for doing fast and flicker-free drawing and painting. If you're interested in animation or smooth updating, this is for you.

Drawing operations take time, and time spent drawing leads to delays and imperfect results. Our goal is to minimize the amount of drawing work we do and, as much as possible, to do that work away from the eyes of the user. To see how to eliminate flicker and blinking problems, we'll look at an application that animates very badly. The good news is that Swing automatically solves a lot of flicker problems.