Animating Images using threads??

[Mike Williams]

My application needs to animate the moon lander ascending and descending. I am trying to use a customized JPanel class to draw the moon lander image. This is the code I have so far:

class ImagePanel extends JPanel implements Runnable 
{
        private Thread runner;
        private ImagePanel Image;
        Image lander = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage( "lander.jpg" );
        Image landerFire = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage( "landerfire.jpg" );
public void startAnimation()
{
  if  ( runner == null ) 
          {
runner = new Thread(this);
  }
  runner.start();
}
//code goes here right?
public void stopAnimation()
{
  if  ( runner != null )
runner = null;
}
// more code goes here possibly
        
        public void run()
        {
            while ( runner != null ) 
            {
// more code here
            }
        }
}