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Posted to dev@pdfbox.apache.org by Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch> on 2008/11/10 09:38:38 UTC
Initial draft for the board report
I've attempted to write a report for PDFBox:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Apache PDFBox is an open source Java library for working with PDF
documents. PDFBox entered incubation on February 7th, 2008.
The website has been set up. The license review is underway and has
already progressed quite far. The export control notification has been
set up. These tasks and most other tasks were all performed by PDFBox
mentors (mostly by Jukka Zitting). Sadly, there has been almost no
participation by the initial committers, yet, except for handling the
license grants and CLAs.
On the user side, some questions don't seem to get answered. Not many
patches have reached us, either.
Issues before graduation:
* Increase community size and activity
* Finish license review
* First Apache release
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Please improve as you see fit. The report needs to be submitted by 12
November 2008!!! To be included here in the end:
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/November2008
On a personal note: I fear that the PDFBox incubation experiment is in
danger to fail if noone (committer or not) dives into actual development
work.
Jeremias Maerki
Re: Initial draft for the board report
Posted by Jukka Zitting <ju...@gmail.com>.
Hi,
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch> wrote:
> I've attempted to write a report for PDFBox:
Thanks! I copied the report to the wiki.
BR,
Jukka Zitting
Re: Initial draft for the board report
Posted by Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch>.
On 12.11.2008 10:18:25 Philipp Koch wrote:
> hi jeremias,
> thanks for preparing the report. it looks good (the report).
Thanks for the feedback.
> > On a personal note: I fear that the PDFBox incubation experiment is in
> > danger to fail if noone (committer or not) dives into actual development
> > work.
> i agree that this is currently a problem. i was too absorbed in the
> last month with other work - hope that the workload will drop in the
> next month...
>
> i was/am surprised that there is not much traffic anyways on the dev
> list since pdfbox (from my knowledge) is widely used. why is that?
> because the core functionality is enough for most users? or are there
> improved libraries around (i don't know about) which users switch to?
Well, there's an popular alternative for many use cases: iText. Also, I
think it's a similar problem as we have in FOP and Batik: established
project of a certain size doing non-trivial things (for example,
implementing a complex specification) with the hype-factor gone. I
suspect it makes decision-makers think that this should be a readily
available commodity that someone else already solved in a satisfactory
way. Therefore, too few people really commit to the thing. Furthermore,
there are lots of relatively cheap commercial alternatives, too. Why
invest thousands of dollars (in developer time) in a software that you
can license for 500 bucks?
> i am still convinced that pdfbox is a very good library which needs to
> be kept alive. personally, i would like to improve the pdf2image
> functionality which is a very cool feature - so, i hope to contribute
> soon.
Same here. My only problem is that I'm not really a user. I've published
a FOP extension that makes use of it but I've written that for a client.
So for me really invest time in PDFBox I'd need a concrete project but
I'm already into others. Hopefully one day... In the meantime, I have to
be content to serve as a mentor and do a few little things every now and
then.
Maybe one day, a client gets to me and asks me to improve pdf2image so
we can include existing PDF files in PostScript, PCL or AFP output
inside FOP. Good thing PDF Renderer (LGPL) @java.net doesn't do any
better than PDFBox in terms of activity.
<snip/>
Jeremias Maerki
Re: Initial draft for the board report
Posted by Philipp Koch <ph...@day.com>.
hi jeremias,
thanks for preparing the report. it looks good (the report).
> On a personal note: I fear that the PDFBox incubation experiment is in
> danger to fail if noone (committer or not) dives into actual development
> work.
i agree that this is currently a problem. i was too absorbed in the
last month with other work - hope that the workload will drop in the
next month...
i was/am surprised that there is not much traffic anyways on the dev
list since pdfbox (from my knowledge) is widely used. why is that?
because the core functionality is enough for most users? or are there
improved libraries around (i don't know about) which users switch to?
i am still convinced that pdfbox is a very good library which needs to
be kept alive. personally, i would like to improve the pdf2image
functionality which is a very cool feature - so, i hope to contribute
soon.
regards,
philipp
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch> wrote:
> I've attempted to write a report for PDFBox:
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Apache PDFBox is an open source Java library for working with PDF
> documents. PDFBox entered incubation on February 7th, 2008.
>
> The website has been set up. The license review is underway and has
> already progressed quite far. The export control notification has been
> set up. These tasks and most other tasks were all performed by PDFBox
> mentors (mostly by Jukka Zitting). Sadly, there has been almost no
> participation by the initial committers, yet, except for handling the
> license grants and CLAs.
>
> On the user side, some questions don't seem to get answered. Not many
> patches have reached us, either.
>
> Issues before graduation:
>
> * Increase community size and activity
> * Finish license review
> * First Apache release
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Please improve as you see fit. The report needs to be submitted by 12
> November 2008!!! To be included here in the end:
> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/November2008
>
> On a personal note: I fear that the PDFBox incubation experiment is in
> danger to fail if noone (committer or not) dives into actual development
> work.
>
> Jeremias Maerki
>
>