Here is what I gather may be the objective:
Convert JPG, PNG, GIF (and other standard web image formats) to an
image with variable resolutions and colors. Ideally this reduces the
amount of fetching of incoming data and processing to be done by the
Apple II web browser.
Here is a what I gather may be a short description of what is desired:
Create a web-based server which takes a URL to a graphics image,
width, height, and color depth as inputs and output a bitmap for use
on an Apple II based web browser. The output could be a number
indicating the size of the output image, another number indicating the
number of bytes per row, and a stream of bytes that contains the
resized image.
Questions:
Are my guesses as to an objective and description close to what you
are asking for?
What would a color depth indicate? How would colors mapped? How
would color palettes be indicated?
Would the server have to based on the existing Java source code?
Could this be rewritten from scratch?
Does it have to be Java? Could other languages such as assembler, C, C
++, Python, Ruby be used?
Could some form of simple compression(s) be used to output the image?
Rather than proxying smaller conversions of the images contained on a
web page, instead might it be faster to proxy the entire web page
including all text, formatting and graphics converted to 6502/65816
machine code to quickly render the graphics on the Apple II client?