Help on custom Serialization

Question

Hey all,
I'm trying to design a networked whiteboard application and the thought I had was instead of trying to send a vector of the points the user has drawn, I send a BufferedImage with transparent background and the server simply draws each user's "layer" one on top of the other and distributes this to all clients. Obviously the problem here is that BufferedImage does not implement Serializable, and I don't have the knowledge to write custom serialization methods, can someone help me out?
~nill

Answer 1

Convert the image to a byte array:
Here is a small example...
     imageFile = new File("image.jpg");
     fis = new FileInputStream(imageFile);
     length = imageFile.length();
     if(length>Integer.MAX_VALUE)
          System.out.println("IMAGE FILE IS TOO LARGE");
     imageByteArray = new byte[(int)length];
     int offset=0;
     int numRead=0;
     while(offset<imageByteArray.length &&(numRead=fis.read(imageByteArray,offset, imageByteArray.length-offset))>=0)
          offset+=numRead;
     if(offset<imageByteArray.length)
          throw new IOException("Could not completely read file: "+imageFile.getName());
     fis.close();
Hope that this helps..