At the Second Annual JavaOne Developer Conference in 1997, I met a programmer from Mexico named Gerardo Horvilleur. Gerardo had created a product that he was publicizing from a booth on the convention floor. His product interested me because in those days I was working on my Java virtual machine book, and his product was one of the few I'd seen that seized new design opportunities made possible by Java's architecture.
Gerardo's product, a Java library called Montage, enabled Java applets or applications to display a special kind of image. The image was special because it was defined not just by data, but also by code.
To display one of these images, the Montage library would first show a background image (stored as plain old image data), then it would dynamically load and execute some Java code (called painters) that massaged the background image. To massage the background image, a painter could process the image to produce a special effect or animate the image -- anything that could be done to an image with Java code a painter could do. The result was the Montage image.
