[haXe] pdf generation with alivepdf & haxe

[Jan Viehweger]

hello list, hello nicolas!

this is my very first post to the list - and of coure not the last one,
cause haxe rocks and i'm trying find out the whole power of this amazing
language.

untill now i was one of theese stupid zinc users who spend a lot of
money for a buggy tools. i was very frustrated about the poor database
features and the missing commandline features which is a must have in a
productive workflow. while googeling for some custom sqlite extension
for zinc i stumbled over haxe, which supports sqlite by default - and of
course "for free"! yes man - this is i was looking for!!! - why nowbody
told me before?!

now to the point:
in many of my applications (of course flash/flex/haxe) i need the
possibility to dynamicaly generate pdf's.
until now i'didnt find a proper solution, cause haxe (still) does not
support this feature (correct if i'm wrong).

so my first idea was:
using the cli version of php in combination with the fpdf class. ok,
this worked somehow but distributing the whole php package was'nt that
elegant.

second idea:
using a very cool tool i found  called BAMBALAM. this is tiny little
programm for wrapping php files in a single exe so you can use it as a
standalone programm. yes - this was cool for some day's, and it worked.
but one thing disappoints me: now i had 3 different languages to handel:
actionscript, haxe and php ...

third, and last idea:
yesterday i found a very amazing project called "ALIVEPDF" on
bytearray.org. alivepdf is an actionscript 3 open-source pdf library.
alivepdf is based on fpdf - which is a good old friend of mine :+).
alivepdf targets to types of pdf generation: LOCAL and REMOTE. the local
way is done by adobe air. the remote one by a php script.
its very easy to create pdf with alivepdf as you can see in
videotutorials on the projects website (www.alivepdf.org). the cool
thing is, that you write your whole pdfcode in as3, and for grafix you
can use the whole drawing api too!!!

so whats the problem now?
as i mentioned, saving pdf files local is done by adobe air. but i dont
want to use air - couse i'm a haxe guy :+).  i saw in the first
videotorial
(http://www.alivepdf.org/wp-content/tutorials/alivepdf-tutorial-getting-started.swf) 

that the whole pdfcode is stored in a flash bytearray which is then
written into file by an air method. i ask myself if haxe could do this
file save stuff to. in the haxe/neko api i found the neko.io class which
also has a "writeBytes" method. but as i'm a very first beginner in haxe
i dont know how to get started with that feature.

here my question: could someone help me ore write a little example which
produces a simple hello world pdf with alivepdf & haxe?
i think this could be very usefull for the whole haxe comunity cause in
my opinion this is the first proper solution for generating pdf in haxe.
it would also be possible to make the alivepdf class available as an
haxe lib ...

so this for now - sorry for my long post an my bad english.
hopefully some is interessted and expirienced enough to help me (and the
community too)

bye janosch,
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: "Dipl. Des. Jan Viehweger" <mail at jan-viehweger.de>
Subject: pdf generation with alivepdf & haxe
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:27:37 +0100
Size: 3501
Url: http://lists.motion-twin.com/pipermail/haxe/attachments/20071204/9c9c6a3b/pdfgenerationwithalivepdfhaxe.eml