Re: Printing with websphere -- JAVA400-L

Title: RE: Printing with websphere

I dont have the email that originally started this thread, so please disregard if my response is way off topic. We faced the issued last year of how to present reports to our web users. We wanted the end user to be able to use just a browser with no applets and also to keep the downloads very small. The solution we found was generate a pdf file on the as/400 (done with some free java classes) and have the jsp execute a very small javascript function to do a window.open on the url pointing to the pdf file. If the user has adobe acrobat reader installed, this works very nicely and is slick. The pdf java classes can generate a 50 page pdf file in about1-2 seconds on our system given a vector of strings, so the whole process is real-time for the user. The pdf classes use the standard Flate compression to reduce the size of the file. Most of our standard reports end up being about 1K per page. No AWT, no remote AWT.

The pdf classses were used by Joe Pluta as the core of his copy spool file to pdf utility. I think you can still get the beta version off his www.zappie.net web site in his javatorium. If not drop me an email. The source/classes are free public domain.

On the applet issue, we spent four months totally removing all applets from our application. We use servlets/jsp's on the as/400 exclusively and the user just needs a browser (and acrobat reader for reports). There are just too many users out on the public internet that have old/slow pcs, slow internet connections, weird configurations... I see more and more developers dropping applets for applications used over the public internet. Oh yeah, by the way, we get great looking web pages with just html and limited use of javascript.

Alex Garrison

----- Original Message -----

From: DUCRET Gilles (GVA)

To: 'JAVA400-L@midrange.com'

Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 2:38 AM

Subject: RE: Printing with websphere

We've already seen this solution. The problem is always the same: all the tools
we have seen to do that use AWT, so we need Remote AWT.

The only other alternative seems effectivly to be applets. We'll do that if we don't
have other solutions

Thanks

Gilles

-----Original Message-----
From: Pluta@nexgensoftware.com [mailto:Pluta@nexgensoftware.com]
Sent: mardi, 23. mai 2000 21:43
To: JAVA400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Printing with websphere

Gilles, the only way I can think of to effectively use JavaServer Pages (by
that, I assume you mean HTML-only) is to generate a temporary GIF or JPEG
image and then send the image to the user (to see this in action, take a
look at http://www.mapquest.com). I personally don't know how to do that,
but it will require some thinking on your part. The only other alternative
is to use an applet.

Joe

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