In an application of mine I have to display locations and great circle paths in a map which is rendered to PNG and then displayed on the web. For this I simply use a world map (NASA's Blue Marbel in fact) scaled to various "zoom levels" as base image and only display the a part of it matching the final image size and fitting all items to be displayed. Straight forward so far.

Now I came across Wikipedia's awesome blank SVG maps which contain all the country codes for easy reference and I was wondering whether it was possible to use those to have more customized colors and to highliht countries etc. So I did a bit of googling and was looking for Java libraries which would enable me to

1. load the blank SVG map to memory
2. allows for easy reference/selection of certain paths
3. do manipulations of coloring, stroke widths etc
4. render to a buffered image as the background for the great-circle paths/nodes

What I came across quite often was Batik, but it looks like a really heavy framework and I'm not quite sure whether it is what I'm looking for. I have recently played around with Raphaël a bit and I like the way it handles working with vector graphics in code. If the Java framework for my purpose would feature a similar interface, that would be a nice-to-have.

Any recommendations what toolset would be approriate for my purposes?