Building 2-D Graphics Applications Using Java and SVG
If you're tired of generating static bandwidth-heavy JPG files for charts, maps, and other graphic images in your Web applications, SVG provides a way to display and interact with dynamically-generated graphics in a browser.
by Puneet Sangal
July 21, 2005
s Web applications become more sophisticated, developers increasingly need to be able to incorporate dynamic graphics and animation. Unfortunately, Web browsers were originally designed to display static HTML; displaying dynamic or animated content has always been a problem in Web applications.
Nevertheless, solutions exist. One way to display dynamic content is to use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a fairly recent (and still evolving) standard pioneered by Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Apple, IBM, and Kodak. SVG is basically an XML-based representation of graphical commands, used to define complex shapes such as Bezier curves. At SVG's heart lies the world of vector-based mathematics, hence the name. The beauty of this technology is its minuscule bandwidth consumption as compared to alternatives such as dynamic jpeg file generation using Java and other graphic APIs. SVG also rivals Flash, by providing high-quality panning and zooming.
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s Web applications become more sophisticated, developers increasingly need to be able to incorporate dynamic graphics and animation. Unfortunately, Web browsers were originally designed to display static HTML; displaying dynamic or animated content has always been a problem in Web applications.
