Late Night PC

Funny I mentioned just yesterday not to confuse Apache Foundation with the high-profile Apache HTTP Server Project. I say it's funny because I started looking today at trying out Tomcat. Once I started surfing around the site, it occurred to me that I never had gotten to testing any of my SVG examples in Batik. Batik, if you haven't heard of it, is a toolkit for working with SVG in Java. So the funny part is that I kept skipping around the instructions trying to figure out what I would have to do in my httpd.conf to use this thing. While I'm sure there are lots of ways to use Batik on a server, and I still intend to, it works just fine with the JVM on any old home computer. After I grabbed Batik 1.6, all I did with it was a simple test with the rasterizer demo application to render and slice up an SVG image, but Batik ran like a champ. It can't crank out a PNG as fast as Adobe SVG Viewer can pop it up in a browser, but finally it's a simple way to produce a high-quality raster image from an SVG. I've used ImageMagick and the Gimp for this now and then but they don't handle SVG lighting filters at all. SVG on the web is great, but you have to wait for end users to adopt it. With Batik, I can use SVG as a tool in the development chain for any project where I see it fit. I see this in the same way as I see XML in general being applied. There are plenty of sites out there (mine included) using XML and XML-derived languages being used out there behind the scenes. It doesn't have to be delivered to the end user to be useful. If you want to see how well Batik does then have a look at these demos - delivered via Java Web Start.