Development

A project I’m involved with has a traditional distributed client-server architecture: multiple servers are interconnected, clients connect to one more servers. In this use-case we’re expecting around four to seven servers with long-running connections between them and approx. a dozen clients with short-lived connections to the server. Initially I had used plain Java networking but during 2013 I’ve switched over to netty.io as a communication layer. Benefits were more agile networking code, better concurrency, etc. At least in theory. ...

Ruby on Rails is perfect for creating web applications but sometimes you just need to create some documents which can be stored or send through email. While printing is no problem with CSS not all users are able to “save/print page as pdf”. The ubiquitous Adobe PDF file format seems to be a perfect solution for this problem. The common solution for this is Prawn (also see the RailsCast about it). Alas prawn uses a custom DSL for defining and styling the document and I would rather prefer to reuse existing view partials. princeXML seems to solve this: it transforms existing HTML/CSS into pdf. This allows to reuse existing views and partials but comes with a hefty price-tag of $3500+. ...