How to add TIFF ImageReader to those registered in Grails

Question

I'm trying to create a Grails application that can display previews of TIFF files, and other images as well.

Background

The images are constructed from a SOAP service that gives me the bytes of the image. In a service method, I take the byte[], construct a ByteArrayInputStream from it, and then create a BufferedImage from that.

def inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes)
BufferedImage originalImage = ImageIO.read(inputStream)
ImageIO.write(originalImage, 'png', response.outputStream)

For JPGs, I can easily stream the images to the browser this way as the src of an img tag. TIFFs, though, I'd need to convert the images into some other format (preferably JPG or PNG) to make them the src of an tag.

The Problem

I know that I need JAI in order to read the TIFF files. The jai_core.jar, jai_codec.jar files are in my classpath. In fact, because I'm on Mac OSX, they're installed automatically. However, when I run the grails application and it tries to construct a TIFF image from the bytes received from the SOAP service, I get this error:

| Error 2013-06-18 15:23:38,135 [http-bio-8080-exec-10] ERROR errors.GrailsExceptionResolver  - IllegalArgumentException occurred when processing request: [GET] /BDMPlugin/BDMPlugin/displayImageFromRef - parameters:
pageRef: 28:22072FBCA0A8889D9C041D76A588BCF4DCB40376A23B5FD5C301378C8E66EB9F4933A5DFCA46365F927D9E91B337B6E1E980FB4406644801
type: TIFF
im == null!. Stacktrace follows:
Message: im == null!
    Line | Method
->> 1457 | write                in javax.imageio.ImageIO
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
|   1571 | write                in     ''
|     28 | writeImageToResponse in edu.missouristate.bdmplugin.ImageService
|     44 | bytesToPng           in     ''
|     39 | displayImageFromRef  in edu.missouristate.bdmplugin.BDMPluginController
|    895 | runTask              in java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker
|    918 | run . . . . . . . .  in     ''
^    680 | run                  in java.lang.Thread

I tried the following script to figure out which image readers were installed:

IIORegistry reg = IIORegistry.getDefaultInstance();
Iterator spIt = reg.getServiceProviders(ImageReaderSpi.class, false);
spIt.each(){
println it.getVendorName() << " | " << it.getVersion() << " | "<< it.getDescription() ;
}

This outputs the following:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard BMP Image Reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard GIF image reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard WBMP Image Reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard PNG image reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 0.5 | Standard JPEG Image Reader

However, if I run that same Groovy script in the Groovy Console, I get this output:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 0.5 | Standard JPEG Image Reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard BMP Image Reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard WBMP Image Reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard PNG image reader
Sun Microsystems, Inc. | 1.0 | Standard GIF image reader
Apple computer Inc. | 1.0 | Standard TIFF image reader

Same set of readers, but it also includes Apple's TIFF reader. Why is the GroovyConsole able to find it and not my Grails environment, even though they're both using the same JRE? Is there a way that I can manually add the TIFF reader via some import from import com.sun.media.jai or com.sun.media.imageio.plugins.tiff?

I tried adding a manual registration of the TIFFImageReaderSpi to my service method:

import com.sun.imageio.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReaderSpi
...
IIORegistry reg = IIORegistry.getDefaultInstance()
reg.registerServiceProvider(new TIFFImageReaderSpi())

The originalImage variable still comes back null.

Answer 1

So there seem to have been a couple layers to the problem.

First, the import com.sun.imageio.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReaderSpi statement was importing the Apple TIFF reader, which apparently just wasn't up to the job of reading my TIFF.

What I really needed was import com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReaderSpi, but that presented me with a couple of different errors; don't worry, I was able to fix them. :)

First, the import wasn't resolving. To get the com.sun.media.imageioimpl package, I got the source for a bundled JAI from https://github.com/stain/jai-imageio-core. I imported that into Eclipse, then built a JAR using Eclipse's Export tool. This I placed in my project's lib folder, but the import still wasn't resolving. I had to manually add that jar to my project's classpath, and then the import would resolve.

Second, when I ran the app, I'd get this error:

| Error 2013-06-19 11:15:27,665 [http-bio-8080-exec-3] ERROR errors.GrailsExceptionResolver  - IllegalArgumentException occurred when processing request: [GET] /pluginproject/Controller/action - parameters:
vendorName == null!. Stacktrace follows:
Message: vendorName == null!
   Line | Method
->>  59 | <init>              in javax.imageio.spi.IIOServiceProvider
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
|   214 | <init>              in javax.imageio.spi.ImageReaderWriterSpi
|   192 | <init> . . . . . .  in javax.imageio.spi.ImageReaderSpi
|    88 | <init>              in com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReaderSpi
|    31 | bytesToPng . . . .  in edu.mystateu.pluginproject.ImageService

vendorName == null? Fortunately, I found this question/answer.

When creating the jar file for jai-imageio-core, I had to manually specify the location of the manifest file, rather than letting Eclipse generate a new blank one. The manifest file was located in /jai-imageio-core/src/main/resources/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF, and once I specified to use that one, the imported lib resolved and read my image.

In the end, the service method's code was perfectly fine. I just needed to actually get JAI imported into my project correctly. Thanks very much to @haraldK, whose feedback got me on the right track.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and while one can manually register single plugins there is also a method to register all plugins which are available in the classpath which is probably a little bit cleaner:

ImageIO.scanForPlugins();

Answer 3

One solution that could work, is to create a file

/META-INF/services/ImageReaderSpi

containing one line

com.sun.imageio.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReaderSpi

and place it on the classpath.

This should make sure that the provider is properly registered.

However, be aware that the Apple provided TIFFImageReader is not the same as the one from JAI, even though the package/class names are the same.

If you want to use the JAI TIFF ImageReader, you will need the jai-imageio.jar. The project is currently, as you noted, left in limbo by Oracle.

If you don't like to use JAI for any reason, I've created a pure Java TIFF plugin for ImageIO, available on GitHub: Twelvemonkeys TIFF plugin. The plugin is available under a business-friendly open source licence (BSD).