Initiative to Remove AWT Dependancy

[2006 IR Open Discussion]

By: Allan Kos - theincongruent

Initiative to Remove AWT Dependancy

2003-12-06 19:21

Hey ya,

 

I would like to inquire about an initiative to revise JasperReports.

 

Anyone who has implemented (or tried to) JasperReports in a server environment without a graphics environment has likely encountered the x11 related exception. This is because the JasperReports relies on the AWT for the generation of PDF. I understand the only work-around to this is to install PJA on the server environment.

 

Sometimes this PJA toolkit may not be preffered OR worse yet, non-standard. For those situations, JasperReports is not implementable.

 

Why does JasperReports rely on the AWT when iText does not? How hard would it be to rewrite it with the AWT circumvented in a future version? How hard would it be for me to do it in my own implementation?

 

Basically, I just want to get the conversation started on the AWT known error's resolution.

 

-Incongruent

 

 

 

 

By: Fred Welland - fwelland

RE: Initiative to Remove AWT Dependancy

2003-12-07 14:15

Well it is not a bad idea to try and expunge AWT from JR.

 

But, I wanted to point out, which has been much discussed on this list, that you can implement JR in a server environment without a monitor, graphics device or any of that stuff. Just use Xvfb or the "headless" switches of JDK1.4x.

 

I have had one system in production since like Febuary of 2003 using Xvfb and Jasper 04x and it works quite well (iPanet iAS 6sp3; jdk 1.2x; and Sun E450)...

 

I am in the process of pushing another project to production with Xvfb, WLS 7, JR 0.5; JDK1.3x.

 

So I know Xvfb works! I have tinkered, succesfully, with jdk1.4 and the headless switches but haven't tested it in a WebApp environment yet.

 

So I am all for trying to re-engineer JR to be independent of AWT - I just correct the miss-conception that you can't run JR (on non-windows platforms) with out some sort of *physical* graphics device.