Possible to send an image to my Servlet as a ByteBuffer?

Question

I am attempting to have my android phone connect to my servlet and send it a certain image. The way I figured I would do this, is to use the copyPixelsToBuffer() function and then attempt to send this to the servlet through some output stream(similar to how I would do it in a normal stand alone java application). Will this way work? If so, what kind of stream do I use exactly? Should I just use DataOutputStream and just do something like the following:

ByteBuffer imgbuff;
Bitmap bm = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.icon);
bm.copyPixelsToBuffer(bm);

...code...
URLConnection sc = server.openConnection();
sc.setDoOutput(true);

DataOutputStream out = new DataOutputStream( sc.getOutputStream() );
out.write(imgbuff.array());
out.flush();
out.close();

Note: I understand that this may not be the proper way of connecting to a server using the Android OS but at the moment I'm working on just how to send the image, not the connection (unless this is relevant on how the image is sent).

If this is not a way you'd recommend sending the image to the servlet (I figured a byte buffer would be best but I could be wrong), how would you recommend this to be done?

Answer 1

Since a HttpServlet normally listens on HTTP requests, you'd like to use multipart/form-data encoding to send binary data over HTTP, instead of raw (unformatted) like that.

From the client side on, you can use URLConnection for this as outlined in this mini tutorial, but it's going to be pretty verbose. You can also use Apache HttpComponents Client for this. This adds however extra dependencies, I am not sure if you'd like to have that on Android.

Then, on the server side, you can use Apache Commons FileUpload to parse the items out of a multipart/form-data encoded request body. You can find a code example in this answer how the doPost() of the servlet should look like.

As to your code example: wrapping in the DataOutputStream is unnecessary. You aren't taking benefit of the DataOutputStream's facilities. You are just using write(byte[]) method which is already provided by the basic OutputStream as returned by URLConnection#getOutputStream(). Further, the Bitmap has a compress() method which you can use to compress it using a more standard and understandable format (PNG, JPG, etc) into an arbitrary OutputStream. E.g.

output = connection.getOutputStream();
// ...
bitmap.compress(CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, output);  

Do this instead of output.write(bytes) as in your code.