I was reading a number of documents online to find the most efficient way to draw a number of items on the screen. Lots of documents seem to lean towards using buffered images however i read on the sun website that volatile images allow hardware acceleration on systems where it is available. What would you guys recommend for a 2d map editor?

heres a link i was reading:

VolatileImage (Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.2)

The application im creating will not require anymore than 1 animation being played at a time and its main purpose is just to lay out images into a tile system if this makes my requirement any clearer.