Originally posted by Sebastian Lindstaedt:
this is my first Post here, so please be nice ;-)
Welcome to the JavaRanch. We pride ourselves on being friendly, so have no fear.
As for your question, in that kind of situation I like to make a Message interface that everything that will be transmitted will implement. The client or server, upon receiving a Message, invoke a process() method on it and the various message implementations take care of handling themselves, or informing a message bus that they have arrived. So your ImageMessage class would contain a byte array as well as the logic to convert it to a BufferedImage and inform the client or server that it has arrived and/or what to do with it.