Sending a image over a network

Question

Hi all,
Here is the problem. I want to send an Image from 1 computer to another computer over the internet using java... 1 computer is a server... that loads a image from harddisk or other resource (internet) and sends this to the other pc (client applet)
How do I send and read it to create an image... ObjectStream is not an options because that does not support Image objects (or am I wrong here?)
Please help
Greetingz
David

Answer 1

Here is one way to to do it. Read the image file as a stream of bytes, send it to the client. On the client-side, create the image from the bytes received.
Here is an example using RMI:
Loading images ad bytes on the server side:
public synchronized byte[] loadImageAsBytes(String filename)throws java.rmi.RemoteException {
      try {
        FileInputStream bis = new FileInputStream(filename);
        byte[] imageBuf = new byte[1024];
        ByteArrayOutputStream boutstream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        for(;;){
          int bytesread = bis.read(imageBuf);
          if (bytesread <0) {break;}
          boutstream.write(imageBuf,0,bytesread);
        byte[] pixmap =boutstream.toByteArray();
        return pixmap;
      } catch (Exception e) {return null;}
   }In this example, loadImageAsBytes() is a remote method.
Here is how you can the image on the client side:
byte[] buffer = loader.loadImageAsBytes(filename);
Image img = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(buffer);The loader object was created using this statement:
loader = (ImageLoader)Naming.lookup("SimpleImageServer");Note that ImageLoader is the interface that specifies the loadImageAsBytes() method.