I am writing a game in Java. I am not using swing. Can anyone tell me if it is possible to use bitmap images .bmp for my graphics??? I am using .gif files presently using the following code, to load the images.

private Image pipe;
pipe = getImage(getDocumentBase(),"pipe.gif");

Also, I can not find any documentation on the method getImage(..) possibly someone knows of a place on the web where you can access help on the java api?