"Lightweight components, introduced by JDK 1.1, offer several important advantages over traditional JDK 1.0-style components. For one, they are much more efficient than traditional components because they do not make use of native GUI peers, being instead a pure-Java kluge on top of the old AWT. More importantly for this particular application, however, is that these components are transparent. This means that a lightweight component can easily overlay information on top of another component."
"As a result, this article is instead about developing a Java applet that draws textured Easter eggs. The textures are just a tile pattern built from a straightforward mathematical function of sines and cosines. We will transform these planar textures onto a sphere's surface to produce our finished product. To quickly draw these images to the screen we will render them into Java Image objects using classes from the java.awt.image package, letting the browser take care of any issues involved in actually displaying the resulting pictures. See Resources for the complete source code."
"In addition to its role as the graphics context, the Graphics class provides methods for drawing simple geometric shapes, text, and images to the graphics destination. All of the graphics-related operations on a component or image occur via one of these methods."
