Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Flying Saucer R7 is out

The Flying Saucer team is proud to announce that we have just released version R7 Final.

Flying Saucer is an open source XHTML renderer I started a few years ago here on Java.net. It can render any XHTML + CSS 2.1 document as a Swing component. With the right stylesheet you can actually render any XML document directly. And you aren't just limited to Swing. Some developers are using it to render images and PDF files. I recently wrote an article that describes how you can render full PDFs with pagination, headers, and page numbers.

Release 7 has major, major improvements over the previous release. We've got almost full CSS 2.1 support now; including rewritten floats, tables, and pagination. We also have a brand new CSS parser that is faster, smaller, and more spec compliant (and paves the way for CSS 3 support). You now need only a single jar file, core-renderer.jar, and with Pack200 it's only 345K. If you leave out the entity files and DTDs then it's only 131K with Pack200! There has even been some work to combine Flying Saucer with HTML preprocessors (like JTidy) to render real websites out there in the wild. (minus the Javascript and dynamic layout). Take a look at the screenshot below.

CSS Zen Garden, fully spec compliant

Flying Saucer really is a fantastic way to render XHTML content. It has taken off far beyond what I originally thought when I started it three years ago. I'd especially like to thank Peter Brant for all of his code improvements and to Patrick Wright for taking over as project leader when I had to devote time to other projects.

Comments

• i think it's great,and i think it can be used in the swing gui builder.
  when i port code from web to swing gui,i realized the html is simple and the swing gui is difficult to built.and the MVC model of web gui is very clear,can we port the servlet and other things to the Swing Application Framework? is the web guys smarter than the gui guys?

  Posted by: showhand on July 16, 2007 at 10:46 PM

• Quite impressive IMO.

  Still, 2 important features are missing:
  - selecting text (it was present in some previous versions, am I right?)
  - incremental rendering

  Anyway - congrats to FS team!

  Posted by: spk on July 17, 2007 at 03:19 AM

• @spk: you are correct, we are missing text selection and incremental rendering. There has been more focus in the last year or more on static output (PDF, images) and less on the interactive use cases, and few people have complained, hence the direction. True incremental rendering would be very difficult (and make the code much more complex) but we hope to reduce the time and cost of re-rendering portions of the screen down that some of the reasons for incremental rendering go away. Please join us on the mailing lists and make your voice heard.

  Thanks,
  Patrick
  FS

  Posted by: pdoubleya on July 17, 2007 at 07:18 AM

• Hi Joshua,

  tried to get the csszengarden site to look what you have above.
  Also tried it with jtidy as a preprocessor, but didn't manage to get the result you have!

  How did you do it?
  Could you show me the code of your browser?

  Great product.

  Thanks

  Frank

  Posted by: f_beullens on July 27, 2007 at 12:22 AM

• Frank: Hi Frank. I asked about this on the mailing list. You can see the response here. I encourage everyone with questions to post on the dev list where most of our engineers hang out.

  Posted by: joshy on August 01, 2007 at 08:08 AM

• Hi, all,

  I am new to the java program world trying to use the xhtmlrender to generate PDF. I got the PDF page generated, but then I encountered 2 problem, the images didn't show up in the page and links displayed as links but does not allow me to link to. Does anyone out there know what was the problem?

  Thanks in advance.

  Posted by: jexplorer on May 22, 2008 at 06:59 PM

• Hi jexplorer. Could you post your question along with some sample documents and screenshots to the xhtmlrenderer project's mailing list? We can help you there.

  Thanks.

  Posted by: joshy on May 22, 2008 at 07:14 PM

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