The new code is Velocity, Flying Saucer, iText and 120 lines of glue. The old code will be replaced with perhaps 500 lines of XHTML-producing Velocity templates.
[The Flying Saucer site -- with the main menu on the right -- was confusing at first. It made it look like a half-baked semi-functional idea for an open source project. Boy was I wrong. It totally rocks!]
I am absolutely delighted at the FS world-view.
- Process the entire CSS specification -- every feature -- especially those related to printing.
- Don't tolerate malformed XHTML. Gecko tolerates all kinds of HTML problems, making it big and sophisticated. Flying Saucer just doesn't tolerate ill-formed XML, making it simpler, and more able to handle every CSS nuance.
Since the document is very simple (with no side-bars or floating elements), simple CSS works. And the Flying Saucer PDF matches the HTML completely. The match was so good that I did a double-take at the first PDF I made.
The best part is being able to chuck 1000's of lines of VB and replace them with 100's of lines of XHTML. I think that could stand to reduce long-term maintenance costs.
This shows up on Planet Python. It doesn't seem like it should.
ReplyDeleteHe talks about Python a lot. Give the dude a break!
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