Swing/AWT/SWT :: Call Repaint 200 Times In Loop And It Only Calls PaintComponent Once?

I have been baffled by the functioning of repaint() - and the SwingPaintDemo3 with the moving square seems mysterious - you call repaint(x,y,w,h) twice and the first time it clears the clip area and the 2nd time it paints the red box. The code in paintComponent tells it to paint the box both times, yet somehow it ignores the initial box and only paints the 2nd one.

I've been writing code to bounce some balls in a box to try and understand the behavior. I set up an array of ball objects, loop through them, move them adjusting for collisions with walls and each other, then repaint(). I call repaint x2 for each ball, just like in the example. In my paintComponenet code, if I try to just paint the current ball only one ball will move, even if I send a different ball object each time. The only way to get all the balls to show up is to put a loop in paintComponenet that goes through all 100 balls every time I call it. I was worried that to move 100 balls I was painting 100x100 times.

So I put some System.out.println commands in my ball move loop, inside my object ball draw commands, and inside the paint component.

private void calculateMoveBall(BoxBalls oneBall) {
System.out.printf("
Entering calculateMoveBall [%1$2d]
",

[Code].....

So even though I called repaint() 200 times (twice for each ball), repaint was actually only called once, drew all the balls at once, and then went back. And I just noticed it appears to have waited until I exited the calculateMoveBall loop to go into paintComponent! The spooky things is how does it know to do that? Does the Java machine 'see' that it is inside of a loop, and perhaps also sees the loop inside of paintComponent, and somehow correctly guesses that it doesn't have to do it 200 times, but can wait and do it once? If I attempt to do the same thing in code, take the loop out of paintComponent() and call repaint() with the current ball, expecting the machine to do exactly what I tell it, it refuses and does it's own thing, waiting to call paintComponent on the 100th ball, drawing only the last ball (so I guess the loop inside paintComponent is not in the logic).

So a call to repaint() is a request for a higher being to decide if it has the time or energy to repaint the clip. If not, it ignores the call, or stacks them up for later (maybe I should try a million and see if it has room for that!) - well so far up to 4000 it behaves the same. This is useful if you are happy with "this is how it works so use it that way". However I really don't like having some kind of hidden logic that I have to trust to work the right way. If I don't want it to wait until later I'm not sure what to do. And I don't trust the machine to do whatever whenever. How do you debug that???

Questions: Is there documentation to know what repaint() will do or how it decides when to call paintComponent? The Swing tutorial gives the example but not the why. "By now you know that the paintComponent method is where all of your painting code should be placed. It is true that this method will be invoked when it is time to paint" "An important point worth noting is that although we have invoked repaint twice in a row in the same event handler, Swing is smart enough to take that information and repaint those sections of the screen all in one single paint operation. In other words, Swing will not repaint the component twice in a row, even if that is what the code appears to be doing." (What the code appears to be doing - now we have to guess what it is doing)

Is there a way to force repaint() to call paintComponent on a clip rectangle (not just on the whole thing?) I would think invalidate() would force repainting of the whole componenet.

Perhaps this is when you draw to a bitmap in memory and paint the whole thing on the screen...