Helder Geovane kindly asked me to post this here, after I published a comment at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:SVG_image_support#Batik_server_revisited
This started out when a colleague posted a proposal on strategy wiki of throwing
some foundation money at the active development of rsvg. I wanted to counter
this with an old question: why not use Batik instead? The decision for rsvg in
2006 was based on the asumption that a Java application was a bad idea due to
overhead. At this time, a user proposed a http Server app based on Simple
(
http://www.simplframework.org). He published a demonstration version
(
http://batikd.sourceforge.net/), but noone reacted, and his work stopped. Now I
have taken a look at his approach, and I find the results are not that bad, for
an early development stage: in most cases, the batikd rendering times are two or
three times those of rsvg, and in some specialized cases (extensive use of
filters), batikd is even faster.
I would say, like rsvg improvements, a Batik server for a production environment
would need considerable work, and I am frankly not qualified to do it. So,
regarding the funding proposal my position is to say that there are multiple
avenues to get better SVG support. (I have seen the comments about svgweb,
another project that seems to need work before it is usable.)
This post here is only meant as an encouragement if someone who knows more about
server development than I do would like to take a deeper look.