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How can I draw individual pixels in Java without using graphics classes?

I don't want to use the graphics/drawing libraries. The only solution I can think of is creating thousands of 1x1 jButtons (which would obviously be impractical). Is there a better solution?

The only way to draw "without using graphics functions" is populate a raw Raster with the byte values appropriate to the color map for the actual image. Then you can use a graphics primitive to render the resulting image in to a window.
Take a look BufferedImage, and work your way back from there.

You could do this by creating a own component by extending for example JPanel and overriding the paintComponent method.
Why don't you want to use the graphics functions provided by Java?

How do you expect displaying the picture onto the screen without using a graphics library? Are you going to write a native method to display pixels onto the computer screen?

Java backbuffer and animations

I'm creating a simple 2D game in java. I've only done this in C++ with the Windows API so far. In java, I'm getting a Graphics object by extending JFrame and calling this.getContentPane().getGraphics(). With this object, I'm drawing everything to the screen, every frame. This raises a few questions:
Backbuffer: I'm not getting any flickering effects, while I'm not using a backbuffer (I'm drawing directly on the Graphics object). Why is this? Does java has a built-in backbuffer or something?
Animations: I'm used to put all animation parts in a single sprite sheet, like in this example:
http://www.envygames.com/share/sample_animation.jpg
Now, someone has told me that you can just draw animated .gif's and java will draw these independent of the game loop. I've tried this out and it doesn't seem to work. Is this true or am I also supposed to use these sprite sheets in java?
Thanks

Yes, Java has a double buffer rendering strategy that can be switched on and off...
Java: how to do double-buffering in Swing?
About the animated gifs, I think it is right, but you may have to put them in the appropriate container (maybe as the icon of a JLabel?).

getting a Graphics object by extending JFrame and
calling this.getContentPane().getGraphics().
don't painting directly to the JFrame for Custom Painting you have to look for JLabel that allows painting everything, another choise will be extending JCompoments, or JPanel for that
for painting in the Swing you have to look for paintComponent(Graphics g), not paint(Graphics g), because this method are lots of time used in examples and ditributed on some of Java ExamplesDepots, that's wrong method with possible lacks

can we zoom in zoom out the drawing we draw on the Canvas?

We have an old (more than 10yrs old) Java Swing applicatin which draws lots of circles and connections (lines) between those circles on a JCanvas (a subclass of JComponent) based on lab data.
Because the data becames bigger and bigger, we cannot display the entire drawing now. We have put the JCavans into a JScrollPane but it is not convenience to scroll the drawing.
Can we add zoom in zoom out for it? if yes, how? I know we can zoom image but the drawing on Canvas is an image?
thanks,
EDIT:
we draw those circles and line with Graphics within paintComponent(Graphics g) method.

You could apply a scaling Transform to the Graphics2D object passed to the paintComponent method. You can learn how to use it in the Java 2D programming trail.

Without knowing anything about your application it's hard to provide useful advice (adding a code snippet or better yet a cutdown example app would be helpful to show how things are being drawn), but I'll give it a shot:
Why don't you multiply the x,y and width,height values by a scaling factor before you draw each circle/line? I assume that somewhere your canvas is using a Graphics object to draw each shape?

Simplest way to draw primitives in Java (not OpenGL)

Just started to getting familiar with graphics in Java.
What is the simplest way to draw primitives (lines, rectangles) in Java without OpenGL (JOGL)?
Looking for methods like putPixel, lineTo, etc.
UPD.
Where to paint? Canvas? Panel? Bitmap?

The built in interface is called "Graphics2D".
Here's a link to a Java Graphics2D Tutorial: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/2d/index.html

You can get a Graphics/Graphics2D instance from any AWT/Swing component via the paint method. JPanel is probably best since it fits well with swing and is lightweight, meaning that only one native window is created - for the top level window. Swing components can also be double-buffered, meaning that the painting is done to an offscreen buffer first, before being transferred to the screen. This gives a smoother appearance and avoids flickering that can happen when painting directly to the screen, and is particularly important for smooth animation.
You can specifically draw to an offscreen buffer ("bitmap") that you can use afterwards, e.g. to draw an image for saving as a file later:
BufferedImage offImg = new BufferedImage(width, height, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
Grapics2D g2 = offImg.createGraphics();
// .. optionally set attributes ..
g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);

My recent question about horizontal scrolling in Java includes a tiny little graphics example source code that you could use as a base to work from. There are both AWT and Swing implementations. The AWT doesn't support horizontal scrolling, so I'll be using swing.
Not recommending these as best practice or anything, they were a quick demonstration of my particular issue, but it might be enough to get you started.
Link is How to use my trackpad for horizontal mousewheel scrolling in a Java AWT ScrollPane

The original Java user interface classes are called AWT. These were "heavyweight" components, that sometimes acted differently on different systems (Windows, Mac, Unix). These components were difficult to use to make a GUI.
Sun developed Swing, which is a set of "lightweight" components that, to the maximum degree possible, work the same on different systems. These components made GUI development somewhat easier.
In order to have a canvas for graphics, you start with a javax.swing.JFrame. You add a child javax.swing.JPanel to the JFrame. You draw on the JPanel by overriding the paint method.
The JPanel paint method takes a java.awt.Graphics as input. You can cast Graphics to java.awt.Graphics2D. The methods of Graphics2D allow you to draw rectangles, images, text, lines, and arbitrary polygons.
You can find out more about Swing by reading Sun's Creating a GUI with JFC/Swing tutorial. You can find out more about 2D Graphics by reading Sun's 2D Graphics tutorial. More details on the Java classes I've mentioned can be found in the Javadoc.

java changing attributes of shapes programmatically

I want to create a number of straight lines connecting small circle shapes. then I want to change the color and width of the lines from within my program. I was thinking of using Canvas to do this but there does not seem to be a way to access individual shapes drawn on canvas to change their attributes after they are drawn. What would be an easy way to implement this?

First of all, what version of Java and which UI toolkit? AWT's Canvas is very dumb, it will not even "remember" what you have painted; when you minimize and restore the window, it will send a paint() event because it wants to be repainted.
The easiest way (if you are using AWT and stuck to Canvas) is to have a List of your shapes (either one list for all or one for circles and one for lines, or whatever you like) and make your paint method draw all of them. Then update the objects in your list. When you are done updating, call repaint() on your canvas and it will call paint() for you again.

You don't paint shapes onto a Canvas if you're using Graphics and Graphics2D functions like drawRect, drawPolygon, drawOval, etc. Once they're drawn, they don't exist as shapes anymore. You just have an image with filled-in pixels.
As mihi said, you may have to keep track of the shapes you're trying to draw, then regenerate your image if it changes. Perhaps you could also "unpaint" a shape you're trying to change by painting over it in the background color and repainting the changed shape.