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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.
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.
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 The tooling and framework support, the fact it is actually fast (despite your outdated conception of it), because the JVM supports many languages besides Java (Scala and Clojure being two such languages commonly in use today), and most of the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.