Ratings and Reviews : Listing
I spent a week reading Batik source code and running experiments with it and profiling it for performance with JProfiler. The results are very pessimistic. Most of the performance loss is in gradient fillers. The fillers are complex by nature and there is no obvious way to optimize them further. SVG Salamander though abandon-ware is about 5-6 times faster and much smaller.
Another thing about Batik is dependencies in the code. Though the pictures presented several years ago slice Batik into smaller subsystems (e.g. if you are interested in Rendering only not in hit testing and/or animation) but in reality practical dependencies almost make code monolithic.
I believe it is possible to re-implement SVG in a smaller and much more manageable codebase. I also believe that there is a way to gain at least 5-10 times in rendering performance. Is it is today Batik is not very useful for java UI implementation unless you want to spend ~1 second per icon of startup time...