Bringing SVG Power to Java Applications
More and more often these days, desktop and web applications need to display and interact with rich graphics. The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format published as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation in September 2001 is part of the response to that need. SVG allows you to describe two-dimensional graphics -- such as generic shapes, images, and text -- with an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) grammar. These graphics can be styled through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or XML, using advanced styling functionalities such as color gradients and filter effects. SVG is the W3C-recommended, XML-based, standards-based alternative to similar proprietary formats.

This article will demonstrate how to build SVG libraries and applications on top of the Java platform. I use the example of the ILOG JViews Component Suite (a Java 2D^TM and Swing-based two-dimensional graphics library) for building visually rich user interfaces. You'll see how a Java SVG-enabled library lets you interoperate with many third-party applications -- from SVG authoring tools to SVG user agents.…


http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/GUI/svg/