Source Code for Gears Applet.

Here is the source code for gears applet.

There are a couple of tricks to make it run faster. You can open the applet jnlp file to see how to enable those features.

First trick is to enable Java2D OpenGL pipeline:
-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true

Also you could use some general performance enhancement switches:
-XX:+DoEscapeAnalysis -XX:+AggressiveOpts

Another suggestion I have received is to run the applet in a separate jvm.