The thing I'd love to see in the image reader is support for other file formats, e.g. gif and tiff. Currently, AFAIK, it only does JPEG (and PNG?)
Any idea if this would this be easy?
Regards, Upayavira
Hey Upayavira,
Well here's the problem there: The JPEG codec is in the com.sun package and is supplied with Java 2D. There are no other
codecs. The javax.imageio package seems to also support reading images but again, only in either bmp or jpeg form.
Given the past GIF licensing debacle, *I don't know* if supporting GIFs is a good idea, unless it is put in a block.
The com.sun.image.codec.jpeg doesn't support any kind of common interface, so even if there were individual codecs
available, each one would have to be supported independently.
I believe the javax.imageio is part of the Java Advanced Imaging API. A long time ago somebody may have began
work converting the ImageReader.java to the JAI api but it never happened. That task could easily get out of hand.
If that work were done, then there is a sourceforge project
http://ij-plugins.sourceforge.net/plugins/imageio/
That if packaged with Cocoon would supply support for reading TIFF, BMP, FlashPiX, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and PNM formats.
The license is LGPL.
When I get a chance I will look into this further, although I would still encourage others to do the same.
Peter
