Joe Germuska wrote:
It depends a lot upon your use case -- but for starters, this very question suggests that if you do write anything, you should call it ITextResult, or FOPResult, not PDFResult.
Yes, I agree, going the route of FOP, or something similar, certainly implies a more generic name than PDFResult.
Writing FO can be kind of tedious, while IText has an API that is pretty well suited to just flowing text in if you have simple needs. I haven't used either exhaustively -- my day job is a LOT about generating PDFs but ours need much finer design control than either of those APIs really support.
I hear you... I've done probably 7-10 different methods to generate PDFs over the years... I was hoping to do something simple and generic enough to cover the 80 in the 80-20 rule :)
It seems like design of a generalized (custom) XML format for describing PDF templates for iText is a pretty big chunk of responsibility which doesn't really belong at Struts. It seems like something that should be done in cooperation with the iText team for eventual integration to their project, or if not, to be served independently.
That's definitely a fair point. There is actually a project outside iText that provides an XML format already, although for the purposes of what I'm talking about it's license isn't amenable (LGPL, which I recall being not acceptable to the ASF). I'll tell you though, I wish I had seen that before I wrote my own :)
Is there any problem with iText's license? (dual LGPL/MPL)? May be worth a look at PDFBox, which is BSD licensed: http://pdfbox.org/
Yeah, I think your right about that too. PDFBox looks interesting... although I'm not sure I want to build against something that hasn't had a 1.0 release yet (hehe, JWP excepted of course!! LOL)
Just a few fragmentary thoughts...
But good ones :) The license issue with iText alone is a good one... that starts to push me towards FOP more than likely, which might ultimately be better since it'd allow for more than just PDF output. Like I said, I'll have to do some playing with that to convince myself it won't be a burden to work with.
Joe
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