From: "New, Cecil (GEAE)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > My suggestion was *not* to merge the two! > > iText is a Java API with a document creation focus. In this day and age, > XSL:FO can be viewed as just another document type - in the same way that > more proprietary or older formats are (that is, PDF, RTF, etc.).
Sorry if it's a bit off-topic, but this issue is similar to the one we just managed to handle between POI (http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/) and Cocoon (http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/). POI is a project that makes it possible to read-write common office file formats in Java. Cocoon is an XML processing framework-server. The POI team donated a Cocoon component that uses POI and outputs XML, but on the Cocoon side, committers saw too much POI code in it. Basically we understood that a project to read-write a file format should have a solid Java API. Other projects can use it to produce other results. Merging is not the best solution, both for developers and users. >From this experience, I would humbly suggest that, after getting the licencing stuff straight, FOP could be refactored to use iText as a PDF generation step. In this way communities can focus on a smaller part of the project with greater efficiency, and the two products may have a much wider applicability than a single merged one. Since iText has a strong community behind it, since it would like to integrate code with FOP, thus coming to Apache, and since FOP could use part of it proficiently, I would like to see iText make a proposal at Jakarta for the creation of a project. All details for this are under http://jakarta.apache.org/site/newproject.html . What do you think? -- Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED] - verba volant, scripta manent - (discussions get forgotten, just code remains) --------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]