animation technique?

I have been looking through animation examples and am interested to find two methods of creating a simple animation. One way is shown to use Timers to schedule a repaint call, the other is to create a new thread and use that to repaint the JFrame over so many milliseconds. I have seen the use of both and the need to override the update method. Some please explain why each one is used the way it is and for simplicity sake, what is the most straightforward way to incorporate in my falldown game.

[505 byte] By [games4dummies3a] at [2007-11-27 4:55:19]