Question about Itext and GAE

[Daniel Reznick]

Hi

I used to work allot with Itext and its an awesome pdf library! Really great!


Recently i started to develop on Google App Engine, and currently it lacks of open source pdf library


Is there any plans for Itext to become compatible with GAE?


Regards

Daniel.

[Bruno Lowagie]

I can only reply with a counter-question:
what do we need to change to have iText running on GAE?
I honestly don't know.

We refactored iText so that it no longer depends on java.awt.Color
by creating the BaseColor class, because that was asked by somebody
who told us the Color class isn't allowed on GAE, but...

What else is needed?

[Daniel Reznick]

From "Will it play in App Engine - Google App Engine for Java | Google Groups"

Its says:

iText
Version(s): ?
Status: INCOMPATIBLE

* iText relies on several classes not in the JRE class whitelist including java.awt.Color and java.nio.MappedByteBuffer. A bug has been filed at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=365255&aid=2810312&group_id=15255.

And From: SourceForge.net: iText, a JAVA-PDF library: Detail: 2810312 - Google AppEngine support

Details:

iText has dependencies on certain Java classes (java.awt.Color, java.nio.MappedByteBuffer etc.) which are ** not ** allowed by the Google AppEngine runtime (see http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/jrewhitelist.html). Google AQppEngine throws an exception e.g "java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: java.nio.MappedByteBuffer is a restricted class. Please see the Google App Engine developer's guide for more details." is thrown for the unsupported class(es).

- Would it be possible to remove the dependency by iText on these Java classes, so as to enable the library to work within Google AppEngine?

[Bruno Lowagie]

Daniel Reznick wrote:- Would it be possible to remove the dependency by iText on these Java classes, so as to enable the library to work within Google AppEngine?

I just checked and the answer is: No, we can't remove those dependencies from the main iText, because we'd have to remove parts such as the PdfGraphics2D functionality that is still used by many developers. PdfGraphics2D extends java.awt.Graphics2D and obviously needs java.awt.Color. I've also checked the MappedByteBuffer class, and some serious refactoring would be necessary to factor that class out.

If we want to provide an iText version of GAE, it would mean we have to maintain and support a separate branch. The cost of maintaining a separate branch is too high for the moment. I'm sorry, but we can't do that for free.