Another 1/2c
I am using fop as the report formatter for a desktop application: I have not
found any other way of getting previewable, printable, saveable high quality
report documents out of java on a client side application.
We wasted quite a bit of time on some pdf-generating library we found which
was non-standards-compliant and involved out of process calls to get pdf
viewer up, temporary files, and general system-dependent ugliness which
always went wrong: the FOP way is a lot easier!
This usage is not mentioned on the FOP site AFAIK. But look at the success
of a piece of total rubbish like Crystal Reports: after a few years doing
this software stuff, I've finally realised, END USERS WANT IT ON PAPER.
Especially the older, more senior ones...
Al
ps - I have grafted it on to my app in a fairly crude way. Anybody else
interested in a reworking of the .viewer package to make it easier to do?
If so, I'll put a bit more time in and offer some chages.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ronald Jaramillo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 10:29 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: RE: Attracting companies to FOP (was: Re: Public API Change in
Driver)
I agree with Mark on this,
Just to make a point I'll tell you about my experience with fop.
At my company we focus on delivering web aplication for traditional brick &
mortar
companies. We' have done some repporting apps and document generation like
invoices
and the like.
When we first needed to generate pdf from scratch( 2 years ago ), we haven't
heard
of fop, so we used pdflib together with java. This was a time consuming and
frustrating process, becouse it was so lowlevel. You have to calculate the
position of all
elements, the number of lines the amount of space, everything.
Making a nice table will take ages. We endend up writing a lot of classes
wich parsed and
formated a html subset, becouse having the presentation tied so close to the
code was
a maintainence nightmare.
When i found fop, i was happy to trow away all those classes.
We have been used fop succesfully on production environment for several of
our custumers for
about 1/2 year.
Fop right now is capable of doing what we need an more than that. If there
is some
feature we need in the future, we will try to implement it. My point is
that, if my
company has been aware of fop existance and capabilities from the begining,
we will
rather had contributed to fop enhancement instead of investing time on those
silly classes.
IMHO fop should present itself on the website in a much better way.
The developers on this list may think there is a long way to go, but
that depends on how
you look at it. For what we needed in our company fop was ready for prime
time.
I think the site should be more especific about what fop is able to do right
now, maybe show
some examples/screen-dumps of tables, svg, images or some unicode documents.
Arved wrote
>I look at OS projects like Subversion and I'm green with envy.
Well on theirs site, they has a section devoted to well define specific
task that need to be done.
Thats something we should do for fop site as well.
For instance, it could be nice to define what it takes to implement
background image support.
Or feature x. I think this model will fit better whith the way fop is been
developed ( people poking at
it on their spare time, comming and going ).
Having an overview of what fop supports, and a list of what need's to be
implemented grouped in self contained
task could be a good place to start. Then a developer/company can see if
their problem can be solved with
fop, and if not they can stimate what it takes to implement what they need.
MVH
Ronald
Mark wrote
> I'm just saying it how I see it, of course; maybe I'm oversimplifying
> and talking out my botty. But the FOP page doesn't really get me all
> worked up about how it's going to change the world, even though I'm
> pretty sure it's impact will be huge. So I guess I'm saying it's a
> marketing problem...?
>
> Cheers
> Mark
>
>
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