A compelling, rich user experience is a key factor for launching successful mobile applications. Mobile SVG radically improves the possibilities for mobile Java application developers to achieve this.

Enthrall your users – Creating an engaging, responsive user experience has always been crucial to stimulate repetitive use of any application. This has become agonizingly evident in the mobile environment, where compelling user experiences have proven difficult to provide as a result of the constrained technical environment mobile phone users are exposed to, with limitations in available terminal display sizes, memory and processor capacity as well as limited  network bandwidth availability.

Before the introduction of SVG-T there was a lack of mobile industry standards for application developers to leverage for creating richer, more exciting mobile applications taking the mobile constraints into consideration. In response to this, SVG Tiny, the result of a collaborative effort held at W3C, was published in 2003. SVG Tiny (a k a Mobile SVG) is now rapidly becoming the technology of choice for creating an advanced, rich user experience based on scalable vector graphics. Indeed, the majority of mobile phones shipped today include SVG support making any applications using SVG widely deployable.

Java ME developers can leverage the exciting possibilities promised by SVG Tiny through the already available JSR-226 interface and from the soon to be published JSR-287 interface.

Empower your application – Scalable Vector Graphics is W3C's non-proprietary alternative to Flash Lite and bitmapped graphics. It enables 2-D resolution- and media-independent graphics in a text-based XML language. This empowers the application developer to create high performance, interactive, animated rich graphics specifically tailored for a mobile environment.

Vector-based images only contain the drawing instructions that determine how the image should be drawn, not the information about each pixel, like for raster-based image formats such as GIF and JPEG. This dramatically reduces file sizes and makes images scale to any screen size with exactly the same sharpness, thus giving exciting possibilities to create e.g. innovative zooming and panning features for any application GUI.

You can also stretch, flip, or reverse SVG images without losing quality.

The latest release of the SVG-T standard (SVGT 1.2) introduces several exciting new capabilities for mobile application developers. It provides a uDOM (Micro Document Object Model), through which a programming languages like Java is given access to and can manipulate the graphical objects. Through the comprehensive event model included in SVG Tiny 1.2 the developer can enable user interaction with the graphical, scalable content objects created. SVG Tiny 1.2 also further enriches the user experience by adding support for gradients and opacity, multi line and editable text.

With an SVG Tiny 1.2 engine integrated with a JAVA-engine, a full-featured multi-media application environment is provided. Graphics, media and logic can be integrated to develop complete, compelling applications with exciting, animated GUI features and advanced audio/video integration.

Leverage SVG from Java ME – Leading mobile industry companies such as Sun, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Ikivo have through the Java Community Process enabled Java developers to enjoy the possibility to leverage scalable vector graphics the standard for interactive, animated “D vector graphics.

The JSR-226 API and the soon to be released JSR-287 API brings the Java ME mobile platform to a new level by leveraging the expressive power of Scalable Vector Graphics.

Graphics capabilities of the JME platform have been rudimentary, where graphics cannot be accessed and manipulated after they have been rendered. Today´s mobile use cases such as advanced, composite user interfaces, mobile TV applications, On-Device Portals require a user experience with exciting, high performance graphics rendering, scalable animated user interfaces and full integration to audio, video and external images – all of which the developer should be able to and control and manage from the Java ME application. The JSR-226 and JSR-287 interfaces bring all of this to the Java ME developer.

Full tooling support – SVG is supported in industry leading graphics design tools. In addition, the Netbeans IDE features advanced functions for developing Java ME applications leveraging SVG Tiny capabilities. The Visual Mobile Designer in Netbeans provides an intuitive way to design a mobile Java application incorporating SVG images and animations. Pre-defined SVG components such as menus, menu items, splash screens and wait screens combined with close integration to leading SVG animation tools like the Ikivo Animator, enables rapid development. You can visually design and change your SVG images and animations, as well as linking them to user events.

This enables the Java ME developer to create on-the-fly mobile animations, exercising rich animation control, creating multiple animations and synchronizations, animating visibility, fill, stroke, scale, and rotation of the SVG images as well as full support for user event handling. All accessible for control and alteration from the mobile Java application.