Ilya & Will,
Thank you for your interest in FOP. At present, the only XSL-FO examples we have access to are in the examples/ directory included with the distribution. There may be more robust sample files that I'm unaware, created by some of our many users, but we don't have them.
It would be *great* if some enterprising and generous developer could spend the time to generate FOP-based XSL-FO documents from the XML, XSLT and XPath specs. In fact, that would be a useful tool for comparing how fop-0.20.5 compares to fop-1.0-dev (the FOP re-design/TRUNK branch). Unfortunately, that hasn't been a priority up to this point. Perhaps it could become a priority in the future.
As always, any contributions made to this effort are greatly appreciated--and not just by the development team. Our users also benefit, as they can use such contributions to demonstrate to management types how useful Apache FOP is. Moreover, I believe they can help facilitate management to take an active role in contributing to FOP development (i.e., allow a developer to 'donate' a portion of company time to Apache FOP).
One thing that I know helps, is when we contribute overviews and instructions on how to implement complex systems (e.g., the steps for taking XML output to a web-based system using Tomcat servlets...).
Cheers!
Web Maestro Clay
On Feb 4, 2005, at 7:53 AM, Will Gilbert wrote:
On Feb 4, 2005, at 10:33 AM, Ilya Khandamirov wrote:FOP is popular. I believe, FOP is also good. I just want to find out, how
good it is. My hope is, that either the FOP team or one of the numerous
happy FOP users could provide me with a representative sample.
I want to chime in saying that I am a very happy FOP 'user'. But on-line examples of my work are difficult to provide as they have been setup behind corporate firewalls. Most of my FOP deployments are used to assemble reports on demand.
The components of these reports are drawn from several database servers throughout the companies enterprise, built into a large XML, which is transformed to FO via an XSLT which FOP uses to produce the final PDF. This work in done as a Tomcat servlet. This process is browser driven, the end-user just clicks a link, then receives an up-to-the-minute PDF report. Most have no idea of the complexity which lies beneath, nor should they.
As an outside consultant I have been able to deliver solutions using FOP which meet the clients specifications but also empowers them to enhance the delivered solution, something they really appreciate. They keep bringing me back for more and more projects, and occasionally to fix their XSLT goofs.
The learning curve on XSLT/FOP may be bit steep but the payoffs are huge!
--will
Web Maestro Clay -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - <http://homepage.mac.com/webmaestro/> My religion is simple. My religion is kindness. - HH The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet
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