How to read byte by byte from appengine datastore Entity Object - google-app-engine

Question

In a nutshell, since GAE cannot write to a filesystem, I have decided to persist my data into the datastore (using JDO). Now, I will like to retrieve the data byte by byte and pass it to the client as an input stream. There's code from the gwtupload library(http://code.google.com/p/gwtupload/) (see below) which breaks on GAE because it writes to the system filesystem. I'll like to be able to provide a GAE ported solution.
public static void copyFromInputStreamToOutputStream(InputStream in, OutputStream out) throws IOException {
byte[] buffer = new byte[100000];
while (true) {
synchronized (buffer) {
int amountRead = in.read(buffer);
if (amountRead == -1) {
break;
}
out.write(buffer, 0, amountRead);
}
}
in.close();
out.flush();
out.close();
}
One work around I have tried (didn't work) is to retrieve the data from the datastore as a resource like this:
InputStream resourceAsStream = null;
PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager();
try {
Query q = pm.newQuery(ImageFile.class);
lf = q.execute();
resourceAsStream = getServletContext().getResourceAsStream((String) pm.getObjectById(lf));
} finally {
pm.close();
}
if (lf != null) {
response.setContentType(receivedContentTypes.get(fieldName));
copyFromInputStreamToOutputStream(resourceAsStream, response.getOutputStream());
}
I welcome your suggestions.
Regards

Answer 1

Store data in a byte array, and use a ByteArrayInputStream or ByteArrayOutputStream to pass it to libraries that expect streams.
If by 'client' you mean 'HTTP client' or browser, though, there's no reason to do this - just deal with regular byte arrays on your end and send them to/from the user as you would any other data. The only reason to mess around with streams like this is if you have some library that expects them.