[Edu-sig] PDFs in Python and Java (Jason: The Valley, installs for you?)

[Kirby Urner]

> The full source code for The Valley will be available to all SpeedTreeRT
> evaluators with the release of SpeedTreeRT 1.6.

Did you actually get the demo to run.  I tried and got installer errors.

To make this about Python:  I've been learning ReportLab, which allows
direct creation of PDFs from scratch.  My goal was to write a primitive
banded report generator, that lets you group records, define headers/footers
and like that.

In Java world, an open source project called Jasper Reports seems fairly
mature, and is in turn based on iText, which I'm also playing with (it's the
Java world analog to Python's ReportLab).

As per Arthur's post, I agree that Java is fairly easy, syntax-wise.  What's
complex is getting a handle on the huge forest of class hierarchies, both
native and downloadable.  But of course that's a challenge in any
full-featured language, Python included.  One just learns to use the
reference materials, such as they are.

Perl has CPAN and there's some buzz about how to improve Python's
infrastructure for sharing code/modules, perhaps with a built-in rating
system.  This thread gets revisited rather often in our Portland group,
thanks to Kevin Altis and others.

Kirby