TIF to JPEG Conversion Utility

From:
******************* WebSpherePro Developer Tips *******************
Published by e-Pro Magazine                 http://www.e-ProMag.com
Issue 52              Editor: Don Denoncourt       November 6, 2003

TO SUBSCRIBE, go to http://www.e-ProMag.com/epsubscriptions .


I just completed a Web Services project where electronic copies of 
checks and other banking documents are retrieved for HTML display. The 
problem was that the images were in TIF format and a plug-in is 
required to display TIF images in a browser. We didn't want to force 
clients to install a plug-in, so we opted to convert the images from 
TIF to JPEG. There are a number of such conversion utilities available, 
both open-source and commercial, but by far the easiest to use is Sun's 
Jimi Software Development Kit ( http://java.sun.com/products/jimi/ ).

Here's a quick tutorial. "From" is the qualified name of a TIF image 
and "to" is the qualified name (with a .jpg suffix) of a JPEG that is 
to be created:

Image image = Jimi.getImage(from);
Jimi.putImage(image, to);
 
I'd say that was pretty easy!

One big issue that I had with Jimi was that it used java.awt classes 
during the conversion and my target platform, the iSeries, has issues 
with AWT on the server. Those issues are surmountable, but until 
recently, the solution requires the clunky use of Remote AWT (RAWT) or 
Native (AWT). But a combination of OS/400 V5R2 and JDK 1.4 resolved 
that problem. JDK 1.4 now has an option called "headless AWT." The term 
headless refers to the lack of a requirement for a terminal, or head, 
to display the image. To use headless AWT, all you need to do is set 
the java.awt.headless property to true. There are a number of ways to 
set Java property values, the easiest of which is to pass them to the 
following Java command:

java -Djava.awt.headless=true

[report a broken link by clicking here]