Due to security constraints on Java applets, the network setup for delivery of camera output to an applet contains three programs on three different hosts: The video grabber running on the host with the camera sends it's data to a proxy running on the host providing the Web server. The proxy in turn hands the video data to the Java applet on the browser host.
Since no ``real'' compression was implemented, the size of the data was reduced by limiting the size of the image frames, and the number of colors (grayscales). In addition, care was taken not to send entire frames, but only parts that had changed since the previous frame.
Displaying images was left to instances of predefined classes in the Java library. A class providing an indexed color model removed the need to convert a single grayscale value to RGB values for each pixel.