Batik - Architecture Overview Batik's modules explained

This document briefly describes the Batik architecture and the role of each of its modules. For detailed module design, you can refer to the Batik UML diagrams Object by Design or yWorks.

The Batik modules are of one of three types:

The following figure illustrates these three module types.

Application Modules illustrate how to use the Core Modules and let users evaluate the Batik software by experimenting with its features.

The Core Modules are the heart of Batik and the primary deliverables for the projects. These are the modules developers use to manipulate, generate, create, convert, render and view SVG content

Finally, the Low Level Modules are used internally by the Core Modules to accomplish their work. These modules are not typically used by developers directly.

As mentioned earlier, the Application Modules illustrate the functionality that Batik offers.

For example, the SVG Browser is built using several Batik Core Modules (such as the JSVGCanvas GUI component and the ImageTranscoders) and illustrates how Batik lets you not only view, zoom, pan and rotate SVG documents, but also search them and convert them to other formats (such as JPEG, Tiff or PNG).

The SVG Pretty Printer is another example that shows how Batik lets you manipulate and transform SVG content, here for the purposed of tidying up potentially disorganized SVG files

The SVG Font Converter illustrates how Batik can help you embed SVG Font definitions in an SVG file by providing an application that converts ranges of characters from a True Type Font format to the SVG Font format.

Finally, the SVG Rasterizer shows how to leverage the Transcoder API to convert to and from SVG content

Note that even though the Application Modules are meant to be usefull and fun to use, they are not the primary deliverables of the Batik project. Instead, they are illustrations of how the Batik core modules might be used and combined.

The Batik core modules are the heart of the Batik architecture. They can be used individually or in combinations for various purposes, and the Application Modules offer some usage examples.

  • SVG Generator is a modules which contains SVGCanvas2D that lets all Java technology applications or applets easily convert their graphics to the SVG format, as easily as they draw to a screen or a printer, by leveraging the Java 2D API's extensible design.
  • SVG DOM an implementation of the SVG DOM API defined in the SVG recommendation. It lets the programmer manipulate SVG documents in a Java program.
  • JSVGCanvas is a UI component that can display SVG content and let the user interact with that content (zoom, pan, rotate, text selection, etc...)
  • Bridge. This module is rarely used directly. It is responsible for creating and maintaining an appropriate object corresponding to an Element. The Bridge converts an SVG document into the internal representation Batik uses for graphics (GVT, the Graphic Vector Toolkit)
  • Transcoder is a module that provide a generic API for transcoding an input to an output. This module transcodes an input stream or a document into a particular ouput format.

The Low Level Modules are not expected to be used directly by developers using the Batik API. Rather, they are supporting the operation of the Core Modules. The Low Level Modules include:

  • The Graphic Vector Toolkit (GVT) module, which represents a view of the DOM tree that is more suitable for for rendering and event handling purposes. This module describes DOM tree in terms of a tree of Java objects.
  • The Renderer module is responsible for rendering a GVT tree and any related task. For example, a raster based Renderer may perform some caching (the default Renderer in Batik does that). However, a Renderer could perform any task it deems necessary and does not have to be raster based.
  • The SVG Parser module contains 'Micro Parsers'. These are parsers for complex SVG attributes such as transform or color attributes. Higher level modules rely on the SVG Parser module.