Client-Server Imaging

A particularly powerful feature of JAI is its capability to distribute processing across a network. Although the typical application might have no need for this capability, distributed imaging is a powerful weapon for many advanced applications. Examples include telemedicine and online gaming and commerce. The basic idea of client-server imaging involves the use of Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI). The client instantiates a stub object that conveys its methods to the host through serialization (basically, turning your objects into a stream).

Now, imagine that you have a client acting as an image acquisition machine and want to perform a mathematically complex series of image processing operations on that data while the client continues to collect new data. An efficient way to develop such an application would be to specify the operations in a Renderable layer of the graph and delegate this portion of the process to the server. Changes to the image operations could then occur rapidly on the server, and the results could be pulled though the rendering chain to many different clients at the same time. A more detailed description and sample application of client-server imaging is developed on Chapter 6.