SVG Support

Recently, Adobe announced the End Of Life (EOL) for their SVG plugin (the way that most people view SVG). And more importantly, the plugin is not certified to be installed on Vista.

From what I can tell that's because of their acquisition of Macromedia and Flash:

The bomb, though expected by the people in the know, was Adobe's discontinuation of its SVG viewer plug-in, the dominant SVG viewer. It was the way to show SVG in any browser (which for most users means the Internet Explorer browser), and though as Adobe had paid good money to buy Flash, the terms struck everyone as stunningly harsh, if not directly hostile to SVG: By the first announcement the plug-in would be gone and unavailable by the end of this year. Later Adobe relented giving the plug-in, a longer lease of life, you can download the unsupported plus-in next year too. This was obviously taken as bad news, but personally I think this is advantageous in the long run, much like when AOL Netscape ceased ownership of Mozilla. This was commonly seen as the end of Mozilla, but I thought it was more likely to be the beginning and was proven right. Sugar daddies are only advantageous to a point. Worse than the loss of ASV is that authoring products like Illustrator are unlikely to provide useful SVG support.

For cross browser rendering of SVG (or something SVG like) some alternatives include:

• Embedding Mozilla into IE to render SVG.
• Use a Javascript library that renders graphics either using VML (IE), SVG (Firefox, Opera) or Canvas (Safari, Firefox, Opera) these include: Dojo, ExplorerCanvas and Plotkit (which also has a good list of browsers supporting various SVG like technology).
• Use Batik as a Java applet.
• Use another plugin such as Rensis (0.5 released this month).

JSF to XHTML to SVG or PDF

I haven't looked at JSF since 2004 where I thought it would be cool to combine Swing and JSF. Coming back to JSF after nearly two years I came across, Combine JSF Facelets and the Flying Saucer XHTML Renderer which takes XHTML content and rendered it using Swing this is then transformed into an image, PDF or SVG. In the past I've used iReport and directly iText to generate reports (PDF and Excel). The thing at the back of my mind is always, this seems to be reproducing a lot of what HTML does and people only really want PDF because it prints well and Excel because they have macros. Until there are macros built into browsers to do manipulation of data that is.