LAVATRON

A JAVA TOPIC
 Lavatron

Lavatron is a Space arena lightbulb display. David

LaVallee, the author of the many different applet had
written the lavatron. The history of lavatron begins
way back in 1974. In 1992 , Lavallee wrote the first
version of Lavatron in objective C and Postscript.
Finally in 1995, Lavatron was written again from
scratch to run under java, and it has undergone
several performance tweaks and iterations since.
 How Lavatron works?

Lavatron is able to present interesting image on

screen because of a small trick that it employs. And
its side effect allow the applet load very quickly. The
reason it loads so quickly is that there is not much
data transmitted over the net. The source image is
JPEG image that is 64 times smaller than the
displayed image. Each pixel in the source image is
scaled up to an 8*8 pixel square. Lavatron paints so
fast because it doesn’t have to repaint what it has
already drawn.
 The Source code

Lavatron starts by initializing data, which includes

loading the source image and creating the column of
bulb images. The last stage of initialization is
painting the offscreen image full of dimmed
lightbulbs to start the display with a clean image.
The Applet tag
the source code starts with the Applet tag.
<applet code=Lavatron.class width=560
height=130>
<param name=“img” value = “s.jpg”>
</applet>
Lavatron.java
the main applet is small about 100 lines of java
source code.
init()
the init() method first determines the size of the
applet by using getSize().
createBlubs()
the createBulbs() method is helper to init().
Color()
the color() method returns the color of the pixel at the x,
y position in the source image as a color object.
Update()
Lavatron overrides update() to do nothing.
Paint()
the paint() method is quite simple.
Start(), stop(), run()
when the applet starts, it creates and start a new Thread
called t. this thread will call run() method. When the
stop() method is called, stopFlag is set to true.
Thank you

SUMANT DIWAKAR