RFE: PixelBuffer could tell byte order

[mtbc]

PixelBuffer allows querying various attributes of the underlying representation except for there being nothing obvious about endianness. Perhaps the PixelBuffer interface could offer something like boolean BfPixelBuffer.isLittleEndian() or ByteOrder PixelData.getOrder()? Maybe it doesn't make sense for the pixel buffer to have an intrinsic idea of byte order or, as the documentation writes of buffers having their "order set correctly", maybe there is no ambiguity about what the correct order is?

[joshmoore]

You are wanting to know the value of the underlying store? Looking at PixelBuffer.getRegion:

* @return buffer containing the data. It is guaranteed that this buffer 
     * will have its <code>order</code> set correctly but <b>not</b> that the
     * backing buffer will have been byte swapped. <b>The buffer is essentially 
     * directly from disk.</b>

will the ome.util.PixelData.getOrder method work for you?

[mtbc]

Heh, getRegion is mostly unimplemented so I've been getting a tile instead, though it looks odd that buffers provide all the metadata about the array structure except for the endianness: it's only for that last nugget that I'm getting a tile to figure the dtype, the buffer already gives me everything else.

[mtbc]

Though as noted in #20 it's not obvious to me what the "correctly" and "byte swapped" in that Javadoc even mean, concretely. How to know which way is "correct", when would it be swapped to what?