Chapter 21. Working with Images and Other Media

Until this point, we've confined ourselves to working with the high-level drawing commands of the Graphics2D class, using images in a hands-off mode. In this section, we'll clear up some of the mystery surrounding images and see how they can be created and transformed. The classes in the java.awt.image package handle images and their internals; Figure 21-1 shows the important classes in this package.

First, we'll return to our discussion of image loading and see how we can get more control over image data using an ImageObserver to watch as it's processed asynchronously by GUI components. We'll also see how to use the MediaTracker utility to handle the details for us. Then, we'll move on to the good stuff and have a look at BufferedImage, which is an image whose pixel data is exposed to you through a memory buffer. If you're interested in creating sophisticated graphics, rendered images, or video, this will teach you about the foundations of image construction in Java.

A few notes before we move on: Prior to Java 1.2, creating and modifying images was only possible through the ImageProducer and ImageConsumer interfaces, which, along with ImageObserver, provide low-level, stream-oriented views of the image data. We won't be covering image producers and consumers in this chapter; instead, we'll stick to the new APIs, which are more capable and easier to use in most cases. If you're interested in the older APIs you can find additional coverage and examples using them on the CD accompanying the book.

Looking in the other directions, we will also be referring occasionally to the javax.imageio package, which is part of the Java Advanced Imaging API (JAI). If you need even more advanced capabilities such as image tiling, loading scaled versions of images over the network, and deferred execution of image data processing for working with really large images, you'll want to look at JAI.

Figure 21-1. The java.awt.image package