On 6/6/06, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Martin Cooper wrote: > I agree that this doesn't sound like something that should happen here. Your saying that in terms of the custom XML wrapper around iText/PDFBox/whatever, right?
Yes. I.e., going the FOP direction is a
different story, right?
No. FOP = whatever. I consider anything --> PDF to be out of scope / too specialised here. -- Martin Cooper I do agree, even though I've already done it
once, the XML template specification is something bigger than we'd probably want here, and is more appropriate elsewhere. One existing possibility is here: http://ujac.sourceforge.net/ This library contains an XML template format around iText. It is however GPL/LGPL, which I recall being a problem at Apache, correct? I think FOP is still the interesting option here. Much more flexible certainly, more output options than just PDF, and licensing shouldn't be any kind of concern, nor should community and future development. I'm just starting to think about what could be done to make it easier on developers... Certainly I could see a Result to generate the data XML automatically in some way, then all the developer would really have to do is create the XSLT. > As > for working with the iText team, unless things have changed recently, there > are two iText teams, because the two guys that started it went their > separate ways some time ago, so now there's "Paulo's iText" and the other > guy's iText. (Sorry, I don't recall the other guy's name.) Also, the last > time I checked, each of the two iText versions were one-man teams. That's interesting, I wasn't aware of any of those politics. I know that when I go here: http://www.lowagie.com/iText/ I see both Bruno and Paul's name... that may just be a historical thing, I don't know. > I think MPL is OK. The bigger concern, as Ted mentioned, would be that > they're all one-man shows. I haven't looked at PDFBox, but I've been > singularly unimpressed by the iText API (although it's been a couple of > years now since I last looked at it). Hopefully PDFBox is better. I just spent a little time looking at PDFBox... it looks decent. I need to look in more detail though... I wasn't too thrilled to see 2+ years of development and still not a 1.0 release... I know Ted said how is anything supposed to get there without being used, and he's of course right, but it still worries me a little... I also see a couple of API changes in recent releases... perfectly OK before a 1.0 of course, but it doesn't exactly make one comfortable about building against it :) Jasper was mentioned in this thread as another possibility... I thought there were some licensing issues there? I thought I remember something about that in the earlier WW->SAF2 talks. I'm not sure a whole reporting solution is the answer, but, thinking about that a bit... There is another possibility along those lines: Datavision. The idea of moving it to Apache was discussed a few weeks back, but it wound up not going anywhere... if there were to be a champion for it, I think it might be a good move. I already have permission from Jim Menard, the original author, to pursue that if there should be interest. In the mean time, I think I've all but convinced myself to explore the FOP path. Seems like if we're not going to go the custom template route, might as well go with the standard, and one that opens up more possibilities than just PDFs in the process. Frank --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
