On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 10:29:18AM +0100, Jeremias Maerki wrote: > Hi gang, > > as you know we've have several inquiries in the past about compiling FOP > with GNU Classpath for use in VMs such as Kaffe or natively on Unixes > (using GCC/GCJ) and about running Apache FOP under .NET. I've done some > experiments last week in this direction and here's what I found out: > > After removing Batik as a dependency for FOP allows FOP to run and > compile under IKVM [1]. So far, I've managed to run FOP from the > command-line as an EXE file on Windows to create PDF files. No fancy > tests, yet. I'll try to see what needs to be done to call FOP from a C# > application by compiling FOP and its dependency into DLLs.
Yay! Congrats all over! > > Batik has the problem that it relies on com.sun.* classes which has been > brought up on batik-dev. (Thomas, just so you know, I'm working on that > one. I'll drop a note on batik-dev about that shortly.) Given this > problem it's currently not possible to compile Batik for use in Kaffe or > IKVM (both use GNU Classpath). Furthermore, it seems that the AWT > implementation of IKVM is unfinished and results in runtime errors > (which have nothing to do with the com.sun.* classes) when forcing IKVM > to run a precompiled Batik JAR. Yup. I was under the impression that the XML graphics project would help work around the most dire problems, though. Right? > Since we've also heard several voices who would like the > Batik-dependency to be optional for FOP (to reduce JAR size), I'd like > to propose making it so by extracting the SVG support from the main > codebase. Some of this will be done anyway, as we're going to move stuff > out to XML Graphics Commons. I'm not sure about the placement of the > sources, yet. There are several possibilities: > (1) Move optional FOP extensions (SVG and MathML) to > src/extensions/<name>/java (where <name> is "svg" or "mathml"). > (2) Move optional FOP extensions to src/optional/java along with code > for JAI, JIMI and similar things. +1 > (3) Move FOP extensions under src/java/org/apache/fop/extensions/<name> > where all the various sources will be concentrated. ATM, the SVG support > classes are scattered over the whole codebase which I don't like so much. > > I'm open for additional suggestions. Generally, I don't like having all > the code in one tree but in XML Graphics Commons this approach has won, > too. > > I think having the opportunity to provide a .NET version of FOP would > widen the number of potential users considerably especially since > to my knowledge there's no usable open source .NET FO implementation out > there. Depending on the license situation (IKVM is BSD but GNU Classpath > is LGPL) we could even think about distributing .NET binaries. GNU Classpath is more liberally licensed than LGPL, actually ;) It's the GPL with a big fat linking exception, that puts no restrictions on the license of the linking code. cheers, dalibr topic > WDYT? > > [1] http://www.ikvm.net > > Jeremias Maerki >
