A very easy, and efficient way to do animation is to use a Swing
Timer. Have it fire as often as the number of frames per second that
you desire.
Disable double buffering on the component.
In the Timer action event call repaint() on the component.
Have another thread build the frames as BufferedImages, normally it
should be building at least a few frames ahead - i.e. buffering the
frames as well.
In the paintComponent(), call drawImage() using the desired frame of
the pre-built buffered image. If the frame is not yet available, then
you cannot sustain the requested rate, probably just skip drawing
that frame, and hope by the next paintComponent the next desired
frame is available.
You don't need the other thread building buffered images if the
amount of work done in paintComponent() is kept to a minimum - you
can do "live" animation.
The OS (especially OSX) will do (in many cases) double buffering that
you cannot easily disable
