Kicking Butt with MIDP and MSA: Creating Great Mobile Applications

12. Scalable Vector Graphics

YOU can do some jazzy stuff with images using the Game API, but images have some significant shortcomings on small devices:

• Images cannot be resized in MIDP. Your application is likely to run on devices with different screen sizes. While it is possible to construct resizable screens at runtime from a handful of images, it’s a little tricky.

• Images cannot be rotated by arbitrary amounts. Although you can mirror images and rotate them in increments of 90 degrees, MIDP does not offer anything fancier. This limitation makes sense, because small devices are not usually equipped with the memory and processing power to perform these types of transformations on images.

• Images are not an efficient representation of some pictures. ...