I wasn't sure where to post this, but it seemed like a systems integration issue, sooo...

I read here:

http://processing.org/reference/troubleshooting/index.html#applet

that:

"Applets cannot open or write to files on the local machine. So things like saveFrame() will cause an error when run from an applet. To read files, make sure that you use "Add File..." to add the file to your sketch (or place it in the data folder yourself) so that it will be included when exported. Then, only use functions like loadStrings(), loadImage(), openStream(), etc. to read data from your file."

I realize this is probably a security measure, but is there a work around for this that anyone is aware of? I want the applet I'm hosting on my server to be able to read & write image files that were not in the sketch's data directory at the time it was compiled.

ex. php is writing images to /path/to/sketch/data/ and I'd like my sketch to be able to load those images, manipulate them, then save the results.

The code I've worked up could accomplish this, but since images can't be dynamically read from the data dir, it won't.

Here's a snippet:

/**
* Assuming the HTML embed contains the parameter
* <param name="someimage" value="arch.jpg" />
* where arch.jpg is a file written to data/ sometime
* after compilation.
*/
String img = param("someimage");
PImage tmp_img = loadImage(img);
image(tmp_img, 0, 0);

Any thoughts?

That worked for loading the image, but what about saving it after it's been modified?

PHP is writing the initial image file to disc, but processing needs to output the modified version to disc too.

I considered inserting the image into a mysql table, but I read that database connections in applets are a security risk. Anyone can decompile the .jar and see your password.

I could limit that db user's permissions & tell the db to only accept connections from the localhost, so a compromised l/p wouldn't matter as much, but that's not exactly ideal.

Also, I'll have a lot of images in a db that I don't really want in a db. I would have to write a cron script or a mysql function to dump the image to disc after its been added to the db.

I think this idea of processing > DB > disc will work, but it all starts to get too baroque for such a simple task. I'm still looking for an alternative...