[xep-support] What's New?

[Kevin Brown]

We have been busy as of late pulling together ideas for our customers and I
think it's time to give those on this list a sneak peak at some early stuff
to pick your brains. 
As more information moves to edge technologies like phones and pads from
computer systems, we felt it was time to examine that arena and decide on
our strategy. While some are approaching this through local, heavyweight and
local library solutions we are considering a different avenue. We already
had some success with Cloudformatter as a SOAP-based solution for rendering
remotely. Therefore, it seems natural to use this capability.

So, as a first step we put together a REST-based formatting service for
RenderX. Under that server-side is a scalable set of RenderX XEP engines.
We tested this with on-demand type formatting of XML+XSL/XSL FO content
first. Worked great.
We've also implemented some client-side tools that can access the solution
-- both XEP Assistant and our hot directory service were hooked to it. Think
Dropbox formatting. Works great.
Now our latest demo and first look for everyone to comment is for HTML
formatting. Yes HTML. The solution already works for XML, it's RenderX
afterall.

And please note that, you could use your XML and XSL today with this and
that will not change. We are only adding HTML+CSS over the top.

So we put together some client-side Javascript that can scrape the current
browser's DOM as it exists, including pulling in all relevant CSS from both
inline styles and external CSS files, resolving the differences between HTML
and XML (like missing end tags on empty elements) and then use that REST
interface to format through an XSL that converts that modified (X)HTML+CSS
for formatting with RenderX. The results are quite good. Of course, there is
work to be done.

If you would like to see a demo, we have implemented now for two browsers --
Chrome and Firefox. IE is coming as currently it requires a bug fix in a
demo library's charting utility and a workaround to combat the fact that IE
disallows base-64 encoded PDF in HTML. The only way PDF is allowed to be
displayed in IE is through the whole page. 

The demo shows various structures and formats, including dynamic charts from
Anychart and D3 libraries. There are old HTML constructs all the way through
modern ones (live div/span). Tables, colors, spans, lists ... and standard
list style lists as well as implementation of mapping lists to inlines like
in menus and such. It has CSS in the document as well as CSS in separate
files. It even has XML in browser styled with CSS that comes through.
Advanced concepts like footnotes mixing XML/HTML and css for tooltips in the
HTML and footnotes in the document. We are adding support (mostly finished)
for @media print support to enable page-layout variation
first/last/left/right.

Read through it, give me feedback ... The "Print It!" button will take a bit
of time, 8-9 seconds as this is a pretty complex to show off the
capabilities. It's an early demo and we are working on it, but in profiling
you would see 1/2 the time getting information client-side organized, 1/4
time sending and receiving which is about 1/4 formatting. We can make the
first one better we think. Use only Firefox or Chrome and the PDF should
show up replacing the HTML you are formatting. Yes there are a few
formatting quirks, some noted but tell us nonetheless.

http://www.xportability.com/XEPOnline/FOTestSuite.html

Oh, and we are setting all the Javascript up in Github over the next days
for all to access. We'll also make the modified (X)HTML to XSL FO publically
available for all of you to contribute if you like. It has been modernized
to support parsing CSS and even mapping generic XML with css to relevant
structures (aka <Foo style="display: table-cell"> ... to <fo:table-cell>.

What does this mean? Well, we will still continue all RenderX XEP
development because it is the backend for this. But you will have options.
You could choose to implement your own backend server like this or implement
one for your customers or use ours. The business model will move to
transactional for this. No more license fees, possibly no more installs or
configurations or issues with your network or ports or? And the price will
range from free to ? depending on the volume you require. You host/we
host/no matter. 

Yes, free.