Eric Hauser’s Blog

In my previous entry, I talked a little about a solution I was working on for a fictional client. After doing some more research and prototyping, I came up with an architecture that I think will work for my application. The main issue I was trying to address was allowing a user to alter an image on a web page for print, but being able to render that image server side using CMYK colors.


It seems to be fairly trivial to send data back to the server using Flex. There are a few options including the Flex-Ajax Bridge or using
web services. Depending on how complex our graphics end our getting, I do not believe that their will be that much data to transmit back to the server, so using JSON along with the Flex-Ajax bridge will probably suit our needs. The client side will render the images using Flash/Flex and send the data back to the server. The data will probably end up containing data on which color the user choose, any effects they want to apply, custom text, etc.


Once we have received that data, I am going to use the Java 2D Graphics library to manipulate my images. The trail on the graphics package gives a good description on the types of things I will need to do with the library (fills, draws, gradient paints, etc). I have used iText in the past to render PDFs, and it supports the CMYK JPEG images I will be creating (my printer needs PDFs).