Not so much "write to file" as "return to user as HTTP response". Web applications in Java usually return requests through servlets (or concepts based on servlets). There's an example of a PDF-serving servlet in Apache FOP (but that's not really supposed to be used in an Internet-bound web application as is due to possible DoS attacks): http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/xmlgraphics/fop/trunk/src/java/org/apache/fop/servlet/FopServlet.java?view=markup
Looks like you have a lot of learning ahead of you. Good luck. On 01.02.2011 16:10:28 Gary Wong wrote: > Hey Jeremias, > > Right now it is just plain text. I guess I got some learning to do. For your > point 5 (stream PDF to user), that's write to file, right? > > I'll google that as I have never done that. Hopefully there are some good > cheat sheets on how to convert text -> XML -> XSLT-> XSL-FO -> PDF. > > Thanks again! > > g > > > > > Re: PDFBox capabilities > From: > Jeremias Maerki <[email protected]> > To:[email protected] > ------------------------------ > Hi Gary > > What do you mean by "just text"? Is that HTML markup, some kind of Wiki > syntax (since you talk about links) or plain text? Anyway, if you > generate HTML you also have to process the text in some way, right? Going > towards XSL-FO is then pretty similar. XSLT could also be used to > convert the HTML to XSL-FO (with the HTML having to be converted to > XHTML by an HTML pretty printer like http://jtidy.sourceforge.net/). > > I'm sure Apache PDFBox could do it but I'm convinced that it would take > more effort and will be harder to maintain. Of course, the XSLT/XSL-FO > approach will also take some initial effort, especially the learning > process. > > To summarize, it looks to me like the processing pipeline would look > like this: > > 1. retrieve the "text" from the DB > 2. if necessary, convert it to some XML-based markup (XHTML or whatever). > 3. use XSLT to convert the markup to XSL-FO. > 4. use Apache FOP to convert the markup to PDF. > 5. stream the PDF to the user > > For the browser display, I guess the process could be quite similar (not > sure what you have planned: > > 1. retrieve the "text" from the DB > 2. if necessary, convert it to some XML-based markup (XHTML or whatever). > 3. insert it into a (X)HTML-based page template (ex. with XSLT) > 4. stream the HTML to the user > > Note: IMO it's important to keep XSLT and XSL-FO apart even though > together they make up XSL. Each can be used independently of each other, > so the collective term "XSL" is usually not very useful. Jeremias Maerki
