Our product intends to save you a significant amount of your time, and spare you the difficulties of a manual process. As explained in my previous post “How to create PDF files from XML with Apache-FOP”, XSL-FO and Apache-FOP provide a free and standard way to create PDF files in a language independent manner.

But there are a number of disadvantages with that approach, e.g.:

• you have to learn XSL-FO (and therefore also XPath and XSL).
• even if you know XSL-FO you do not want to be writing FO templates using a text editor.
• there is some logic that cannot be easily defined using XSL-FO. For example, grouping of data requires you to use the so called Muenchian method , which isn't straightforward to understand.
  

In order to overcome these drawbacks, at J4L Components we have developed J4L FO Designer. The designer is a Visual (WYSIWYG) editor that will generate XSL-FO files for you. This makes the start into the XSL-FO world very easy, and it is also a useful tool for experienced developers since you can create and test XSL-FO files very quickly.

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I was intrigued about all the buzz around the Rails framework and the Ruby language, so I thought it was the time to check it out by myself and start by learning Ruby. So, as I usually do, I assigned myself some specific learning task: in this case porting the J4L barcoding software from PHP (which in turn was ported from Java).

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