I agree with you Alan. The Batik web site has some explanatory pages but there is a still a distinct lack of documentation that explains the various subsystems from the perspective of someone who wishes to do advanced things with Batik that may include modifying the source itself. It can be a bit baffling to locate the part of the code base that is relevant to the task you have in mind.
But I love Batik. It's probably the best Java class library I have come across and I want to get the most out of it. Cheers, John From: Alan Deikman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, 3 November 2008 16:18 To: batik-users@xmlgraphics.apache.org Subject: Re: Why is Batik so complex? [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Please don't get me wrong - I am sure it *needs* to be this complex > - I just want to understand why. Does this start to give you a feel for why Batik is a bit more complex than a really simple graphics tree... This answer was very helpful, but still Batik is more than a little intimidating. Consider SVGGraphicsElement class. It has 7 super-classes (not counting Object), 19 interfaces, and 16 "direct known" sub-classes. To understand what is going on you have to understand Swing, AWT, DOM, DOM Events, Threads, CSS, ECMAScript, XPath, and several other packages. User documentation is almost non-existent, so if you try to read the code you quickly find out there are 81 packages that start with "org.apache.batik," all interlinked and many with naming conventions that must mean something, but there is no key anywhere. For example, the substrings "GVT", "OM", "XBL", "Bridge", -- all unexplained. I realize that many of the questions are obvious to those who grew up with the structure -- but starting from scratch is not for the faint of heart. Mind you I'm not complaining. I like a challenge like this, and I must say it all works incredibly well. When I introduced Batik to my application, it took like 5 lines of code (not counting imports) to construct a JSVGCanvas object and display it successfully. All I could think was wow. However to do anything much more fancy drives you to obscure and difficult problems really fast. (I'll be posting another question later tonight maybe.) I suspect that Batik's wide deployment is going to be slowed by this. Apropos of that; Alexander Kolesnikov's book is very good, but it doesn't get past the basics. A "Mastering Batik" book is needed that documents the internals. Thanks in advance for all you guys that answer questions here. -- Alan Deikman
