Ben Galbraith's Blog

SVG Goodness

Over at my other home, I've been talking a little about SVG's role in this new Ajax re-labeling of good ol'e DHTML techniques. I find a future where manipulating vector graphics and HTML constructs through the same API (and hint hint, it ain't DOM) all in a browser very interesting.

But Java desktop developers don't have to wait until the future to start incorporating SVG into their applications. Thanks to the Batik project, Swing applications can embed gorgeous (and often interactive) SVG files into their UIs today. I think the Klondike solitaire and Spain map examples from Batik are particularly compelling.

While I've long advocated the SVG/Batik combination as an excellent way to create beautiful, data-driven static graphics, Firefox's upcoming SVG support has interested me in SVG's potential as a user interface technology (and having the Batik team recently release a 10x faster version of their project for my Mac certainly helped that along) to supplement or replace more traditional GUIs. Cool stuff...

Comments

• The world gathers for SVG goodness :-) at SVG Open 2005,
  august 15-18, the Netherlands

  Posted by: steltenpower on June 14, 2005 at 07:27 AM

• It's a pitty that Batik doesn't support declarative animation and it's very heavy. I found SvgSalamander pretty good in those respects.

  Posted by: sat1196 on June 15, 2005 at 03:25 PM

• sat1196: I hadn't run across SvgSalamander. Bully! Looking forward to playing with it. However, lately I'm very interested in doing interactive UI work with SVG, and given SvgSalamander's lack of JavaScript support... I'm not feeling a lot of joy.

  Posted by: javaben on June 15, 2005 at 04:34 PM

• sat1196: Hmm... Salamander chokes on 2/3 demos I've tried it with (batik candy, map of Spain, and anne, all from Batik). But, I noticed that it does have a Java-based DOM API. That's interesting. I'm intriguied by using Batik as a way to display the same SVG UI in a Swing app and a browser, but, moving away from that, it could be interesting to do Java-specific interactive SVG...

  Posted by: javaben on June 15, 2005 at 04:39 PM

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