[cairo] cairo without X dependencies, server-side svg to png rendering?

[Jeff Kowalczyk]

I've been looking for a long time for a library that would render a decent
subset of svg for use in web applications. Ideally, I would render png
directly to http output, without temporary files.  I use python as a
scripting language where bindings are available, but an apache http module
which would accept SVG text would be almost as useful.

A few months ago I read some encouraging posts here about rendering
backends that could eventually allow cairo to function without
X-windows-releated dependencies. Typical linux web servers omit many of
these dependencies.

Can anyone speak to cairo's plans towards offering rendering solutions
with server-appropriate library dependencies? I don't expect librsvg to go
this route, but it sounded like cairo might be able to.

This is a lesser point, but I've always thought it would be neat to use an
accelerated OpenGL card to do this type of server-side rendering. I often
put an nvidia card in servers I'm building. I'm watching the OpenGL
backend progress with great interest, hopefully this would be possible
someday. Certainly, dependency on X would be needed in this case, as would
some mechanism broker rendering requests to the hardware, which can only
render requests one at a time, but very quickly with the hardware
acceleration.

Thanks.