Multimedia - An Introduction to Network Programming with Java - page 326

JavaScript, PHP and Python. In fact, the overhead of building up a Web page to use
applets for transferring multimedia fi les over the Internet and the security restrictions
placed upon applets can often make the transfer of fi les via Java applications prefer-
able to the use of applets. In such applications, the use of interface Serializable
(described in Sect. 4.6 ) is crucial.
Java's original support for audio was restricted to Sun Audio fi le format ( .au
fi les). Nowadays, Windows Wave format ( .wav fi les), Macintosh AIFF format ( .aif
fi les) and the MIDI format ( .mid or .rmf fi les) are all supported by the standard Java
libraries. For the transfer of image fi les, the original release of Java accepted only
GIF format ( .gif fi les). Support for the JPEG format ( .jpg and .jpeg fi les) was added
in JDK1.1. In order to play video clips and most other fi le formats, however, it is
necessary to download the Java Media Framework. This API will be covered in a
later section of this chapter, but we shall restrict our attention to the standard Java
SE provision for the time being.

11.1 Transferring and Displaying Images Easily

In Java, classes Image (from package java.awt ) and ImageIcon (package javax.
swing ) are used for holding and manipulating images. Either may be used on its
own, but ImageIcon is particularly useful for loading an image from the current
directory into an application. For example:

ImageIcon image = new ImageIcon("pic.gif");
ImageIcon is also useful for transferring the image across a network, since it
implements the Serializable interface. There are more ways than one of transferring
image fi les across a network via Java. However, since ImageIcon implements
Serializable , it is particularly convenient to use the method described below.

1. Create an ObjectOutputStream object from the relevant Socket object at the
sending end.
2. Transmit the ImageIcon object via method writeObject of ObjectOutputStream .
3. Create an ObjectInputStream object from the relevant Socket object at the receiving
end.
4. Receive the transmitted object via method readObject of ObjectInputStream .
5. Typecast the received object (from type Object ) into ImageIcon .

As might be expected, there will often be a client-server relationship between
the two ends of such a communication (though it may be that the two ends are actu-
ally peers and are using the client-server relationship merely as a convenience).
The basic code for the two ends of the communication will be very similar to that
which was featured in several of the examples in earlier chapters, of course.
Because of that, such lines will not be commented or explained (again) here. The
lines of code corresponding to steps 1-5 above, however, will be commented
clearly in bold type.