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Apache PDFBox Hits 2.0 (sdtimes.com)

Posted by timothy on from the file-formats-rule-the-world dept.

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.

34 comments

  1. Java by manu0601 · · Score: -1, Troll

    Support for forms in open-source PDF viewers is currently disappointing,

    And one's hope is that yet another Java bloatware will fix that?

    1. Re:Java by ArmoredDragon · · Score: -1, Troll

      And one's hope is that yet another Java bloatware will fix that?

      What's got me scratching my head is that we've got a file format commonly used as a vector for malware running on top of a runtime also commonly used as a vector for malware.

    2. Re:Java by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    3. Re:Java by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > What's got me scratching my head [...]

      Dream Team!

      *chuckle* you made my day :-)

    4. Re:Java by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, because C and C++ were never vectors - fuckwit.

  2. Improvements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Support for forms in open-source PDF viewers is currently disappointing, and I hope this heralds improvement on that front.

    I hope the market fragmentation caused by this will help PDF die a quick death, so it can be replaced by something sane.

    1. Re: Improvements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why not make something to replace PDF then? Fire up some code.

    2. Re: Improvements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      /bin/ps | /usr/bin/lzma

      Better in every way.

    3. Re: Improvements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's about as useful as
      rm -rf /

    4. Re:Improvements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > 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.

  3. XFA Should be a top priority. by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re: XFA Should be a top priority. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Xforms would be better as it is non proprietary

    2. Re: XFA Should be a top priority. by jrumney · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Xforms would be better as it is non proprietary

      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.

    3. Re:XFA Should be a top priority. by james_marsh · · 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.

    4. Re: XFA Should be a top priority. by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  4. Wrong by Vlijmen+Fileer · · Score: -1, Troll

    What is wrong with people still writing stuff, even starting to write new stuff in Java?
    Java sucks majestically; literally everything written in it is ugly, slow and a memory hog.
    It has done so since its inception. Amendments were made, but the core of the problems has never been solved.

    1. Re:Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    2. Re:Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Java wil die off under te stewardship of Oracle. LLVM, BEAM and .NET will take over.

    3. Re:Wrong by hattig · · 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.

    4. Re:Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mod -1, Pants-on-fire

    5. Re:Wrong by ArhcAngel · · Score: 1

      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
    6. Re:Wrong by nine-times · · Score: 1

      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.

    7. Re:Wrong by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      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.
    8. Re:Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

    9. Re:Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey, the dumb fuck showed up.

    10. Re:Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're an idiot. C# is the windows phone of languages. And it's falling by the year.

    11. Re:Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

  5. PHP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The continuing popularity of the language proves it.

    By this logic, PHP would have been a better choice.

  6. Whoah! by c · · Score: 0

    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.
  7. Excellent! by Somebody+Is+Using+My · · Score: -1, Troll

    An app that combines the the thoughtful security practices of Java and Adobe into one convenient package. What could possibly go wrong? ;-)

    1. Re:Excellent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a library, not an app, and it is from Apache, not Adobe. So pretty much 100% wrong there.

  8. iText by hoggoth · · Score: 1

    How is this different or better than iText?

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
    1. Re:iText by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, for one it's not licensed under the AGPL, so you can use it in your internal projects without having to open source everything else it even tangentially touches.

    2. Re:iText by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It cost $0.00