Re: PDF Performance -- WEB400

FWIW I presented a session at the recent Orlando Common Conference on "Open Source Report Writing Tools for IBM i". You can find the presentation here:
http://www.opensource4i.com/Open_Source_Report_Writing_Tools_for_IBM_i%20-_Orlando_2010.pdf

I also finished up some additional work on the RPG Report Engine which now has an RPG wrapper for iText (rudimentary) and can run reports from RPG created for Jasper or BIRT. The BIRT addition took the zip file from about 10mb to 150mb (!) and I haven't had time to strip out jars and plugins that aren't relevant to the BIRT report features that the Report Engine supports but it is all open source and the complete (and large) zip file can be found here:
http://www.opensource4i.com/downloads/2008042811495836/rrepackage.zip Even with my new Comcast service it'll probably take a while to download.

RRE still suffers from not having a "server" piece in place that handles the problem of JVM warm up. A report "server" is the next thing that will be added but you might find the iText stuff useful for generating PDF directly from RPG.

Pete

On 5/12/2010 9:06 AM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

I'm a bit overwhelmed with the response to this thread. I must say that I have been considering each response thoughtfully. It seems that whenever the subject of reporting comes up, there are a lot of angles to consider. It seems that some combination of spool files, HTML files, PDF files may be needed. Converting a report into an "image" format, may also be needed. No single product or programming interface meets every need. You must pool from multiple sources to meet most needs.

Last night, I began looking at IBM's PSF Server, InfoPrint Server, and now with release 7.1 there is a bundled IBM i product that runs under PASE, and named Transform Services. I gather by some of the documented programming interfaces, that PSF is Java based, in part - evidently the part that generates PDF documents from spool files.

Nathan.

----- Original Message ----
From: Peter Connell<Peter.Connell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries<web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tue, May 11, 2010 6:36:40 PM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] PDF Performance

Nathan,
I have mentioned in some previous thread that we have been happily running PD4ML to generate a PDF version of our web page on request by pressing a button.
This has been working well for the past year now and we never have to worry about it. A 10 page PDF response within 5 seconds.

I have not downloaded a newer release (in fact I got an automatic email update from PD4ML yesterday about the latest and greatest).

But I was concerned about performance with regard to loading the JVM.
I was able to determine the appropriate class to call with the intention of calling a class directly from RPG to benefit from the 1 JVM per job feature.
In fact I found a bit of java code on the web somewhere that showed how to create a little wrapper that called the correct PD4ML class in the expected manner.
So I compiled this wrapper as a little class of my own which I now call from RPG.
To avoid the JVM startup for the job I use a server job and a data queue (I know you'll like that)

Running the class in a server job was also essential since, to implement the headless java requirement, IBM apparently launches a PASE environment within the job just to achieve this.
Unfortunately this conflicts with any existing apps which may already run some task that uses PASE because they fail when they attempt to start the PASE environment.

Peter