On Thu, 2007-04-26 at 07:11 -0500, david wrote: > Hello Bruno, Paulo and all of the iText dev, gurus, users, ranters and > ravers. I am a Java programmer and a long time user of iText (since 2001). I > recently had a job interview. The interview went south right away with the > inteviewer attacking my choice and use of the iText Java package to produce > SQL generated reports for a Java project described in my resume. I explained > to the interviewer that PDF is just re-defined PostScript which make working > with PostScript printers a lot easier. And, iText makes the entire problem of > producing programmatic printable reports a breeze. Using my own statements > against me the interviewer claims he can program in PostScript dismissing > the need for the iText package. The interviewer went on to say hypothetically > that the iText package is probably wrought with bugs and everytime the > interviewer's versioned software is incremented to the next version the iText > package would break the versioned software and have to be fixed everytime it > is us > ed. The interviewers statements were made using the view of what would > happen if his companies software was to use the iText package. So my > questions are: > > 1. Is programming directly in PostScript better than using iText?
I am neither a PS nor a PDF guru, but PDF as a format offers a lot more compared to postscript (eg. input fields etc.). And PS as a format is not free, it needs to be licensed (not sure if that still applies). > 2. would iText break versioned software everytime the target software is > versioned? Hmm, I have _never_ had a single issue that could confirm this claim. What I know however is quite a prominent library that uses itext as a PDF generator: jasper http://www.jasperforge.com/. In the past updates to the jasper library always required you to recompile the reports created with previous versions (jasper serializes the reports). This was indeed very annoying, but absolutely not itext related and recent versions of jasper don't have this issue any more. I have the suspicion that your interviewer is mixing things up ... -- Udo Rader bestsolution.at EDV Systemhaus GmbH http://www.bestsolution.at
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