Apache PDFBox Hits 2.0 (sdtimes.com) 34
mmoorebz writes: After three years of development and with over 150 contributors to the code, Apache PDFBox 2.0 has been released. With this release comes enhancements and improvements. The Apache PDFBox library is an open-source Java tool for working with PDF documents. The project allows creation and manipulation of PDF documents, and the ability to extract content from them. Support for forms in open-source PDF viewers is currently disappointing, and I hope this heralds improvement on that front.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
... on top of a runtime also commonly used as a vector for malware.
Which of the other runtimes are not commonly used as a vector for malware? Other PDF software has been implemented using e.g. native code and JavaScript, both of which are used as vectors for malware. Probably even more than Java, actually.
XFA Should be a top priority. (Score:5, Informative)
XFA Should be a top priority for the Poppler project and any other project that works with PDF Forms. Many government agencies rely on XFA to submit forms. Currently, the only instance of Acroread that supports XFA under Linux is Acroread 9.5.5; which Adobe has pulled from their download site and requires third parties to acquire. All Poppler based Adobe Acrobat readers, while some of them can use Acro Forms, they can't use XFA.
I think that it should be the goal of the goal of the Open Source Community to either create or Acquire XFA ability by whatever means necessary.
Re: XFA Should be a top priority. (Score:1)
Xforms would be better as it is non proprietary
Re: XFA Should be a top priority. (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you serious? Xforms has been a standard since 2003, and almost no software supports it, and no organization uses it. This is a pretty clear sign that it is dead, and not worth supporting. XFA is at least supported by one software package that is widely used in business, and used by Government agencies worldwide, among others. And while it is "proprietary" in that one company controls the specification, it is hardly a secret [adobe.com].
Re: (Score:1)
Tons of businesses use XForms, they just automatically translate it to something else before the customers see it because browsers are too busy churning their UIs and implementing fads than implementing something that actually works well. XForms allows you to do non-Javascript, interactive forms, and then Mozilla goes and tries to implement XForms through Javascript so the Javascript free standard now requires users to enable Javascript. Idiots.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't disagree that XFA would be useful, but why should it be the overriding goal of the poppler project? The XFA specification is over 1500 pages and thus would eat a huge amount of people's own spare time to implement.
It's obviously important to you, though, so what are you going to do about it? Maybe find a willing implementer and organize a bounty/crowd source funding for them to work on it if you can't code it yourself?
In the meantime use XPDF which does support XFA.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
This is all true ... 15 years ago. Seriously dude, time to wake up. Java is not the right tool for everything but there is a huge problem space for which it is ideal. The continuing popularity of the language proves it.
PHP? (Score:1)
The continuing popularity of the language proves it.
By this logic, PHP would have been a better choice.
Re: (Score:2)
The continuing popularity of the language proves it.
There may be circumstances where the language is very useful, but there should not be any desktop software distributed that requires the user to install any kind of Java plugin or development kit. There's just no excuse for that kind of stupidity.
If someone can take this code and use it to build native apps, I'd be excited to try it out.
Re: (Score:2)
Even 15 years ago Java was pretty good.
Those that keep crabbing about it are mostly just repeating what they have heard.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Java is absolutely massive on the server side. If you are writing stuff like this, that means you actually have no idea at all about how absolutely massively ingrained Java is in most large businesses globally to run their back offices, their website backends, and so on.
Relating to this story, one of the common features of corporate backends is generating documents, so this PDF parsing, generation and manipulation library will surely be used by many many places.
Why is it used? The tooling and framework support, the fact it is actually fast (despite your outdated conception of it), because the JVM supports many languages besides Java (Scala and Clojure being two such languages commonly in use today), and most of the memory use is actual data being held in memory, the small amount of additional memory the application might use over a C++ application is negligible in today's world.
Re: (Score:2)
Whoah! (Score:1)
A summary for an article about a release of software most of us have never heard of that actually describes the purpose of the software?!?
Slashdot, you really have changed!
iText (Score:2)
How is this different or better than iText?