[Biojava-l] Advice on Java set up

[Christopher Pickslay]

>Is it really true that Java has no simple in built -> GIF or -> PNG
>converters for awt/swing/whatever components? (confused shake-of-the-head
>from over here. Why on earth not!)

AWT/Swing does have built-in support for displaying GIF and JPEG. See 
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/painting/loadingImages.html.

The 1.3 JDK introduced somewhat buggy support for PNG decoding, and the 1.4 
JDK introduces PNG encoding, and a whole new Image I/O framework (see 
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/imageio/spec/imageio_guideTOC.fm.html), 
which should significantly improve image handling.