Apache PDFBox Hits 2.0 (sdtimes.com)
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.
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.
Why not make something to replace PDF then? Fire up some code.
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.
... 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.
> What's got me scratching my head [...]
Dream Team!
*chuckle* you made my day :-)
Java wil die off under te stewardship of Oracle. LLVM, BEAM and .NET will take over.
/bin/ps | /usr/bin/lzma
Better in every way.
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 The tooling and framework support, the fact it is actually fast (despite your outdated conception of it), because the JVM supports many languages besides Java (Scala and Clojure being two such languages commonly in use today), and most of the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.
Mod -1, Pants-on-fire
The continuing popularity of the language proves it.
By this logic, PHP would have been a better choice.
That's about as useful as
rm -rf /
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!
Log in or piss off.
One of the largest commodity trading platforms (Intercontinental Exchange) is written in JAVA and I can assure you speed is what trading is all about. If a JAVA program is slow then perhaps the developer needs to look at optimizing their code.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
> I hope the market fragmentation caused by this will help PDF die a quick death, so it can be replaced by something sane.
That implies competence not in evidence on the part of FOSS developers with respect to print media.
Let me know when LaTeX can do interactive forms, archival quality files, or proper display layers.
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.
Even 15 years ago Java was pretty good.
Those that keep crabbing about it are mostly just repeating what they have heard.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's a library, not an app, and it is from Apache, not Adobe. So pretty much 100% wrong there.
Java wil die off under te stewardship of Oracle. LLVM, BEAM and .NET will take over.
Maybe you're coming from a .NET frame of mind, where a single company (Microsoft) can dictate the lifecycle of the software.
Java is software released under the GPL.
True, the Oracle version of Java might die.
However, due to the GPL, Java will live as long as there is a least one person who wants to run it.
And Java will thrive as long as there is at least one person who wants to maintain it.
How is this different or better than iText?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Yeah, because C and C++ were never vectors - fuckwit.
Hey, the dumb fuck showed up.
You're an idiot. C# is the windows phone of languages. And it's falling by the year.
In that case you should probably do something about those hundreds of different Microsoft C runtime versions (both 32 and 64 bit) that crappy windows apps keep installing.