Dear Bruno, dear Paolo, I want to inform you that some weeks ago I started porting iText to PHP. The plan is to lower the prerequisites for running iText on shared servers, so every webmaster can make use of the library without needing a Java environment.
For some reasons, several PHP-based CMS have postponed or even dropped PDF support in the last years (this includes the award winning Drupal CMS that I've been contributing to for years). The reasons include: - both their custom classes and available free PHP classes were (and still are) not powerful enough for even the most basic purposes - using iText over a Java-PHP bridge would have significantly raised the CMS' prerequisites and therefore posed barriers for wide adoption I believe that a PHP port can help spreading iText and more generally Open Source PDF generation to a wider audience. While major, professional websites already use the free iText library (Java or .NET) or could do so, commercial PHP classes are still widely used. At this point about one third of the classes have been rawly ported to PHP 5, and even the raw port continues to be major work. The following steps would be some architectural questions, including the question how close PHP-iText should follow the original Java iText. Finally, apart from a different syntax, both PHP's architecture and built-in functionality considerably differ from Java and the .NET platforms in some aspects, which also has impacts on good practices. This includes: no true overloading, weak typing, dynamic handling of variables' size, few built-in objects, limitations in type-casting between custom objects, etc. p.p. I'm not even sure if this list includes all of the more important differences. So there is still a long way to go, and it's even hard to say for sure, that the work will lead to a working and satisfactory result. I will definitely know more in a few weeks. At the moment I don't see much sense in sharing the still severely broken code with the community. However I will immediately contribute the code to a VCS as soon as the port is working to some extent. Also, I'm open to discuss this and all other questions. I'd also be very happy about suggestions, ideas, and answers on the questions raised above. Feedback on the general idea would definitely help me keep devoting considerable amounts of time into the port work. Best regards, Pancho ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php
