At 3:38 PM -0400 6/5/06, Frank W. Zammetti wrote:
Not a bad idea... I've never been a big fan of XSLT, always seemed overly
difficult to me for what it was, but certainly sticking with a standard
has appeal, and I've done a little bit of FOP work, so it's not all new.
One thing I was thinking about for the Ajax result stuff was to have
optionally a toXML() and toJSON() method on the Action... if they are
present, they would be used by the Results rather than the automatic
generation process... would allow for more complex outputs than the
automatic process is capable of.. having toXML() on the Action might be a
good idea in general, precisely for things like PDF generation and the
XSLT Result you mention. Maybe some default implementation (the one from
AjaxXMLResult possibly?) in ActionSupport might open some doors?
In any case, I may have to play with your suggestion a bit and see what it
might look like... I like the idea of using standards, but I have some
doubts as to how easy it would be for developers to use, generally.
It depends a lot upon your use case -- but for starters, this very
question suggests that if you do write anything, you should call it
ITextResult, or FOPResult, not PDFResult.
Writing FO can be kind of tedious, while IText has an API that is
pretty well suited to just flowing text in if you have simple needs.
I haven't used either exhaustively -- my day job is a LOT about
generating PDFs but ours need much finer design control than either
of those APIs really support.
It seems like design of a generalized (custom) XML format for
describing PDF templates for iText is a pretty big chunk of
responsibility which doesn't really belong at Struts. It seems like
something that should be done in cooperation with the iText team for
eventual integration to their project, or if not, to be served
independently.
Is there any problem with iText's license? (dual LGPL/MPL)? May be
worth a look at PDFBox, which is BSD licensed: http://pdfbox.org/
Just a few fragmentary thoughts...
Joe
--
Joe Germuska
[EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://blog.germuska.com
"You really can't burn anything out by trying something new, and
even if you can burn it out, it can be fixed. Try something new."
-- Robert Moog
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
