The Java 1.1 imaging APIs were designed to be asynchronous, for loading images over slow networks. The design is very complicated and hard to implement. In 1.2 BufferedImages seem to have replaced Images. So, for example, Component.createImage() is declared to return an Image, but actually returns a BufferedImage. This makes the APIs synchronous -- which should make them much simpler to implement. We should do the same in our AWT implementation. This will involve the following: - removing all uses of ImageObserver, except when reporting errors in image loading, and when reporting a new frame in animated gifs - replacing GtkImage with BufferedImage - merging GtkImagePainter into GdkGraphics2D - making the switch to using GdkGraphics2D exclusively
Confirmed.
Ok, in light of my reworking of GtkImage, I should add some thoughts here: - GtkImagePainter is gone. GtkImage now does its own drawing, and wraps a GdkPixbuf. - ImageObserver use is pretty much elimated for GtkImage use now, although it should be reintroduced for animated gif support. This can probably be done nicely within the GtkImage class without involving other stuff. - GtkImage should probably be kept to a small extent even in the future, if only for internal Component usage. (I'm thinking about animated-gif support for ImageIcon buttons for instance) - Component and Toolkit.createImage can create two kinds of images, either from a file (essentially immutable), and drawable (createImage(int, int)). The latter should definitely become a BufferedImage with Graphics2D. (as BufferedImage is drawable and its getGraphics() method should return a Graphics2D object) The former should probably be implemented on top of ImageIO in the future. Although the question remains if that'll make things a bit too complicated for animated gifs? - the Graphics peer now supports drawing BufferedImages (although slowly) through the ImageProducer/Consumer interfaces. This should give us a chance to get BufferedImage working at least to some extent. Sketching out a BufferedImage strategy: - The goal is to draw BufferedImages and be able to draw *to* BufferedImages fast. That means no copying or converting pixel data on these operations. If we have to choose one, it should be the latter. Copying image data after every drawing operation would be costly indeed. - User-defined ColorModels are allowed. So the former goal can never be realized fully. Realistically, we should aim for the predefined BufferedImage types. - In other words, we need to differentiate our BufferedImage drawing code for the predefined types, and others. - Storing the image data in Javaland memory space will make data copying necessary, since it can be relocated by the VM. BufferedImage memory must be natively allocated then. - This makes me belive that wrapping these native memory buffers is what java.awt.image.DataBuffer is for. So our current implementation wrapping java arrays is wrong. - Currently, Cairo only seems to support RGB-24 and RGBA-32 color models. We really need it to support all predefined BufferedImage types. (or face copying and converting pixel data on every draw operation) - The easiest starting point for implementing all this should therefore be BufferedImage.TYPE_4BYTE_ABGR. - I still have no good idea how we should handle drawing to a BufferedImage with a user-defined color model and pixel storage. Although I'm not sure this is an important case either.
(In reply to comment #2) Apparently I was wrong; DataBuffer does indeed wrap a true Java array. E.g. With the JDK, if a DataBuffer is constructed from a java array, changes in that array will be reflected in the DataBuffer. Same goes for the array returned by Databuffer.getData(). So this appears to be a bit of a conundrum. Perhaps DataBuffer could represent a *pinned* java array, with the databuffer constructor pinning the array from the native side and the destructor unpinning it? Is that legal? This won't help if the array pointer returned by JNI is a copy though. Problematic.
I'm changing the summary to be more general. Now that GTK 2.8 and Cairo 1.0 are out we can make the transition to using Graphics2D exclusively in the GTK peers. This will allow us to re-organize the Image APIs to handle VolatileImages, BufferedImages and normal Images, remove GdkGraphics, remove GdkPixbufDecoder and split GdkGraphics2D into Image- and Component-specific graphics-contexts.
As requested by Tom I add the following information from the following mailinglist thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.classpath.patches/5606 The application that uses this functionality is Caliph & Emir http://caliph-emir.sourceforge.net/ you can run Emir with: jamvm -Xms32m -Xmx96m -cp Caliph.jar at.lux.fotoretrieval.RetrievalFrame
I should update my previous comment: DataBuffers created by the user, i.e. the DataBuffer implementations in the public API do wrap true java arrays. However, when creating a BufferedImage on the JDK the corresponding DataBuffer is not one of the public implementations. And that most likely wraps a "native" bitmap. This seems like a good idea, and it's what I'm currently advocating.
Is this still valid? GdkPixbufDecoder still lives, but GdkGraphics seems to have gone.