Just to clarify - what I've described here is not necessarily a hard and
fast reason why it can't be done, but more the issues and considerations
that go into why we haven't done it in the past. That, and the fact
that there isn't a big history of this being requested (insofar as I
don't remember there being a bug/rfe filed against it).
It should certainly be filed as an RFE and we can discuss the technical
hurdles and the workarounds in that context and gauge the level of
interest from the community...
...jim
On 3/10/15 11:37 AM, Jim Graham wrote:
Serializing images by content is generally wasteful in terms of the size
of the data stream.
For images loaded from a URL or file, presumably those can be reloaded
by the application if it has a way to retrigger loading its resources (a
common technique is to lazily load some images or have a central method
for loading media - both of which are easy to trigger in the process of
deserializing).
For images that are generated on the fly, often those can be regenerated
by the code, but it may not be as automatic as lazily reloading an image
from its file/URL.
One issue is that images may be loaded from a cache and multiple
references stored throughout the program (particularly for images used
as common UI elements). I suppose that a well-written serialization
mechanism may notice the repeated references and try to share the
serialized forms, but I'm not entirely sure how that works or how that
would impact serializing the images.
There is also the issue that BufferedImages can be fully custom, which
means that we have no idea how the pixels are stored or where they are
stored. The fact that ColorModel, SampleModel, and Raster are openly
subclassable allows for such completely custom implementations. We
could not guarantee serializability of custom subclasses of any of
those, unfortunately...
...jim
On 3/10/15 10:20 AM, Jean-François Savard wrote:
Hi,
I've realized java.awt.image.BufferedImage is not serializable.
After a couple of research, I've realized that each java image types
(correct me if I'm wrong) are not serializable at all.
I've then decided to do research without specifying java as language and
realized serialization of image is not present in most of the languages.
I've come to the conclusion that is simply because serializing an image
is illogical. When you load an image, it is because you already have the
resource stored somewhere (file or in-memory), so there is no point in
serializing it as the main utility of serialization is to store data
independent of the JVM, which is already the case for an image file. For
the case where the image is in-memory, it mean you already loaded the
ressource and have the byte array so it is better to simply serialize
that byte array.
Would you please confirm that my understanding is correct ?
Best regards.
