Release Candidate 1 of Version 2.0 of my Java PNG library is now available from:
   http://sixlegs.com/software/png/

The API documentation is here:
   http://sixlegs.com/software/png/latest/javadoc/

This is a complete rewrite of the library, which now requires Java 1.2 or higher. The 1.x branch will continue for users who need Java 1.1 compatibility (e.g. J2ME), but probably only for bug fixes.

Benefits over the ImageIO PNG decoding built into Java:

• Compatible with Java 1.2+
• Ability to skip particular chunks (useful for dealing with certain corrupted PNGs)
• Custom chunk handling
• Access to raw image data
• More customizable decoding parameters
• Faster decoding (about 15% in my benchmarks)

Benefits over the Java-1.1 compatible version of the library:

• Uses the modern BufferedImage-based Java APIs
• Decoded images use less memory
• Smaller jar file (under 35K)
• Access to raw image data
• 16-bit images do not have to be reduced to 8-bit
• Faster decoding

The license has changed from LGPL to GPL-with-library-exception (the same as the GNU Classpath project), which as I understand it shouldn't affect most users.