Pdf from Jsp

[Naveen Sydney]

has anyone used any commercial product with a decent api and does not cost a lot to generate pdf reports from jsp. I do not want to use fop or iText since my company is very particular about support. any pointers will help. thanks
syd

[William Brogden]

Since a PDF is a binary format, and JSP write character data, I think you are going in the wrong direction.

[Naveen Sydney]

sorry iam not sure what u mean . r u saying that i cannot generate a pdf from a jsp?

[Brian Glodde]

Definitely you can, but I really haven't used anything other than iText. I understand the support issue, but it's open source...I recently implemented it in a commercial product and it works flawlessly.

[Joe Pardi]

How about PDFLib? It's not pure Java, it's written in ANSI C++, but has a Java wrapper which allows you to call it from Java.
The price is reasonable and the support is very good.
http://www.pdflib.com

[Jaume Sola]

You may want to look at RReport:
http://www.java4less.com
and click on "RReport".
It has the following advantages:
- very reasonable price (starting at $35)
- Documentation and support are included in the price.
- it can print, create PDF or DHTML output.
- It works with java 1.1 also
- It includes a standard ready to use servlet.
- Includes RReport Visual Builder for easy design of reports (no programming, no complicated API)
- Supports lots of object, charts, multiline fields, barcodes, evaluation of expressions.
- Can read data from database.
- source code is available and can be freely modified for commercial applications also.

[William Brogden]

The important point is that the whole idea of JSP is to make it convenient to write HTML pages. For that reason JSP just assumes you are going to be writing characters NOT binary data like a PDF. If you try to serve a PDF through a JSP out stream you get junk.
Instead, just use a servlet to serve PDF - with a servlet you have complete control over the output stream and can send any kind of binary data.
Bill