Dear Processing Community

I'm trying to load images from a Sqlite-Database.
As I'm facing LOTS of images I use soft references for the images that need to be shown...
Getting the image looks like this:

Code:

public PImage getImage(){
if(imageData == null || img != null || img.get() == null){
String sql = "select image_data from mood where id=" + id;
imageData = ActiveRecordManager.executeBinaryQuery(sql, "image_data");
}

try {
if(img == null || img.get() == null){
img = new SoftReference<PImage>(new PImage(ImageIO.read(new ByteArrayInputStream(imageData))));
}
imageData = null;
return img.get();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
finally{
ActiveRecordManager.setAutoCommit(true);
}
return null;
}
 

I am however getting a weird exception:
Code:

Setting pragma flags: 
Exception in thread "Animation Thread" java.lang.ClassCastException: [I cannot be cast to [B

at sun.awt.image.ByteInterleavedRaster.getDataElements(ByteInterleavedRaster.java:351)

at processing.core.PImage.<init>(PImage.java:182)

at ch.mood.domain.MoodImage.getImage(MoodImage.java:110)

at ch.mood.gfx.AnimatedImage.draw(AnimatedImage.java:42)

at ch.mood.frames.MouseClickProcessingFrame.draw(MouseClickProcessingFrame.java:45)

at processing.core.PApplet.handleDraw(PApplet.java:1406)

at processing.core.PApplet.run(PApplet.java:1311)

at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:637)
 

What gives? The byte[] is loaded just fine from the database(I checked using the debugger) and in an earlier version of the code I used Java2D and displayed BufferedImages, which also worked fine. What's wrong with the code?

I'm actually using the constructor for a PImage that takes a Image, which BufferedImage is a Subtype of, and that's what ImageIO.read() returns...
Still there's a class cast exception.

That can't be, I have the Source-Code of PImage(Image) and it handles BufferedImages by checking the type of the image passed in.
I tried adding the cast nontheless, but it still doesn't work.

However, the exception occurs in the call to: WritableRaster.getDataElements()...

I actually hoped I could stay in the processing domain and not go back to Java2D for this. I can't be something no one ever does. BufferedImage is such a common class. Loading images from disk is such a common case.
Loading images from a database (or any other source where you get a byte[], aamof) should not be so uncommon. There has to be a nice, clean way to do this.

In the mean time, thanks for the answer I will try it out today, when I get time to work on my processing project, as there's lots of other code that needs tending too

What I had in mind only used Java2D to load the image:

Code:

import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Graphics2D;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import processing.core.*; 

public class pap extends PApplet {

  BufferedImage bi;
  PGraphics work;

  public void setup() {
    size(640, 480);

    bi = new BufferedImage (640, 480, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);

    //You can load bi from your database
    //or paint into it with this
    Graphics2D gbi = bi.createGraphics();
    gbi.setColor(new Color(255,255,255));
    gbi.fillRect(20, 20, 50, 50);
    
    
    
    work = createGraphics(640,480,JAVA2D);

    Graphics2D gg = ((PGraphicsJava2D)work).g2;

    gg.drawImage(bi, null, 0, 0);

    frameRate(30);
  }


  public void draw() {
    image(work.get(),0,0);
  }

  static public void main(String args[]) {
    PApplet.main(new String[] {"pap" });
  }

}
 

Ok, so here's what I found after going through both the PApplet and PImage classes. The way to get this to work without any additional drawing involved (which I don't want):

Code:

byte[] imgBytes = loadBytes("../img/bird.jpg");
Image awtImage = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(imgBytes);
PImage img = loadImageMT(awtImage);
 

This can successfully be used to create a PImage from a byte[]. I don't know if it works for pngs as well, or only for jpegs. One would have to find out. I don't especially like the call to Toolkit.... but if that's what it takes...

If this is can be confirmed as being the nicest and fastest way (the second being way more important), then this should maybe find it's way into the PImage/PApplet class:

Something like

Code:

public PImage loadImage(byte[])
 

would rock.