Flying Saucer

The old code was 5700 lines of bad VB.

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.