Summary

In this article you learned about double buffering, multithreading and were introduced to the BasicAnimate class. These are all important concepts that will help you to build your own animated applications. Future articles will take animation much further, but for now, you have been introduced to the basics of animation.

Double buffering allows you to draw to an off-screen image. Then, when desired, this off-screen image can be drawn to the screen. This allows your drawing to the screen to happen at once, the user does not momentarily see an half-drawn image, which results in "flicker".

Multithreading allows your program to do two things at once. The "run" method will be run in the background. This allows the "run" method to drive the animation. Usually, the "run" method will loop endlessly producing the animation.

You were also introduced to the "BasicAnimate" class. This class combines double buffering and multithreading. This provides the foundation upon which all of our animation examples will build. This class will be refined somewhat as the article series progresses.