Media Beans For Me
This is a really cool link courtesy of Dr. Thauvin:
I've been working on an implementation of the Enterprise Media Beans API since July of last year, but I haven't found enough time to finish it...
The Enterprise Media Beans specification is discussed in the Java Specification Request 086 (JSR-86).
The Enterprise Media Beans architecture allows the integration of rich media (image, audio and video) into the J2EE programming model. This means your media could take advantage of all the capabilities of the Java2 Enterprise Edition: transactionality, security, scalability, availability, just to name a few.
The specification divides the architecture in two parts: Media Foundation Beans and Media Entity Beans.
Media Foundation Beans let you represent your media independently of its kind. It represents media in a uniform way, letting you program against interfaces representing the media and its metadata (width, height, color dept, frame rate, etc.) instead of programming against a particular media format (GIF or MPEG video for example).
You could use Media Foundation Beans to transcode from one format to another, for example to convert your GIF files to PNG (due to patent problems) when serving them from a Servlet. You could resize your media to certain needed dimensions, or add digital watermarks to the stock photographs you sell online. All these media transformations are represented with interfaces, this allows to implement transformation chains of any kind, from any media to any media.
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This sounds like a really kick ass spec! It relates to what I'm working on now from the server side of things. MMS means multimedia messaging and the server side of mobile development is going to need a robust way to handle that type of data. This spec looks like a great way to throw multimedia stuff on JBoss or Weblogic, and have the middleware handle some of the hard part in a pluggable manner.
Yah, baby. Good stuff.
-Russ