Simon Pepping wrote:
On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 08:50:06AM -0800, Clay Leeds wrote:
Florian,
On Oct 31, 2004, at 7:17 AM, Florian Hecht wrote:
Hi FOP devs,
I' ve developed a form extension for XSL-FO for an university project.
It's an extension to FO like the fox extensions. With it you can
declare and define the usual form elements like edit fields, radio
buttons, check boxes, combo boxes, list boxes, comment fields and
buttons. They are inserted into a document as inline objects, so that
they flow like normal text. As a proof of concept I've extended
fop-0.20.5 to support my form extension. I'm using the system around
ExtensionObj to make fop understand my elements and I've extended the
PDFRenderer to generate PDF documents that contain forms, that can be
filled out and submitted just like normal HTML forms.
At the moment the module for fop consists of a jar archive with the
classes and a new batch file to start the processing (I'm not using
the fop class as a starter, because I need to create a different
renderer). The system works so far and is able to generate all of the
form elements named above. Submit and reset buttons work as they're
supposed to. I didn't test every layout situation for the form
elements, so it might produce unexpected layout in some cases. As I
said it's a proof of concept implementation and not a final product.
The reason why I'm announcing this is that I will finish the project
in a couple of days and I don't think I will develop the form
extension any further. Maybe someone will find the sources usefull as
a starting point or is even willing to develop it further. The sources
and the precompiled jar archive can be found at my homepage [1]. I've
also got an example fo document with my extension there, together with
the resulting PDF file. So anyone who's interested can take a quick
look at it. The paper I'm writing on this project will be released in
couple of days (in German though, Studienarbeit) together with a
little documentation on the form extension in English.
Before you post on fop-user perhaps you/we should transfer it to a more
'permanent' server (since your e-mail will be in the FOP archives in
perpetuity). I'm thinking that a good to place for this extension is on
the 'Objects For Formatting Objects' Sourceforge project page[2]
(assuming that Simon Pepping and/or other FOP committers agree).
However, before we do that, we need to ensure it has the proper
licensing. Please go to Apache Software Grants page for information on
how to transfer[3].
I think it is a good project to be hosted by the OFFO project. The
purpose of the OFFO project is to keep FO-related OS projects
available for users and prospective developers.
In view of the fact that you do not wish to develop it further, it
should work out of the box for fop-0.20.5. Are you willing to answer
questions from users?
It would be good if you have some developer documentation, to give a
prospective maintainer a headstart.
It would be best if you release it under the Apache2 License. However,
OFFO is able to host projects under any OSI approved Open Source
license. You need to send the grant to me as the project maintainer; I
will deposit it with the OFFO project.
Note that I am not offering to do maintenance or to learn enough about
the project to answer user questions. Currently OFFO does not have CVS
services, but they can be set up if there is an interest.
Alternatively, use Defoe. Defoe does have CVS services, and it does
have the 0.25.5 maintenance branch as a module. I can give committer
access to the FOP_Maint module to those like Florian, who have shown the
ability and willingness to improve the code.
There is a long list of developers of fixes and extensions to FOP who
have been told (for how long now?) that 0.20.5 is frozen, and how many
of them have applied their modifications to HEAD. Very few, I think.
My intentions with Defoe, as you know, describe a completely different
arc. It seems that HEAD may achieve 0.20.5 functionality in the near
future, and make it to a release. In that case, it may prove useful to
have a de-facto (De-foe-to) 0.20.6 functionality as a target for the
first maintenance release .
If Offo becomes a full-scale 0.20.5 maintenance site, with full
hyphenation included, fair enough. While the Board pursues its current
policy wrt licensing, e.g. with Rhino, there is no option but to home
elsewhere if projects want to provide a complete service to users, so I
expect to see more of it.
Peter
--
Peter B. West <http://cv.pbw.id.au/>
