Painting over an applet

Question

Here is my problem
I am simply trying to make something paint over an applet. My search brought me to just putting a Canvas over the applet, and then using that to paint, but that didn't work the graphics just return null, and I don't understand why.
I will try to explain this again
I am trying to create a component that will paint over another component, which is a client but that shouldn't matter. And I just can't get anything that to paint over it. I know the canvas is in the right spot, but it just doesn't work (grahpics return null when I do getGraphics() in the canvas). Any ideas?
THANKS

Answer 1

Austin187 wrote:
what do I use when I use paint(Graphics g)?Swing is the preferred choice and the Sun tutorials show how to use it (for example in Swing you override "paintComponent" instead of "paint"). Just in case you use AWT, you might want to have a look at this short sample code:
import java.applet.*;
import java.awt.*;
public class AppletDemo extends Applet {
    private Panel content;
    private MainPanel mainPanel;
    @Override
    public void init() {
        try {
            EventQueue.invokeAndWait(new Runnable() {
                public void run() {
                    content = new Panel();
                    content.setLayout(null);
                    content.add(new PaintOver());
                    mainPanel = new MainPanel();
                    mainPanel.setSize(getSize());
                    content.add(mainPanel);
                    setLayout(new BorderLayout());
                    add(content);
        } catch (Exception ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
class PaintOver extends Panel {
    public PaintOver() {
        setBounds(30, 15, 50, 50);
    @Override
    public void paint(final Graphics g) {
        g.setColor(Color.YELLOW);
        g.fillRect(0, 0, getWidth(), getHeight());
        g.setColor(Color.RED);
        g.drawString("Painting", 5, 20);
        g.drawString("Over", 5, 40);
class MainPanel extends Panel {
    public MainPanel() {
        setLayout(new BorderLayout());
        add(new Button("Test 1"), BorderLayout.NORTH);
        add(new Button("Test 2"), BorderLayout.WEST);
        add(new Button("Test 3"), BorderLayout.CENTER);
}