[reportlab-users] Advice on switching from XSL-FO (FOP) to ReportLabs

[Andy Robinson]

Felix,

Thanks very much for this.  I knew FOP was slow but did not
know the difference was this big...

The tables comment from David Foster is fair but something
we are sure we can address in the next few weeks - but if
you follow the right guidelines, you can sidestep this totally.
Invoices are a classic simple-to-do example.

You and others may be interested to see that ReportLab are sponsoring
the XML Conference (www.xmlconference.org) in Philadelphia, December,
and I am giving a talk "ReportLab - the practical alternative to FOP" :-)
We're actively looking for an app where we can do head to head
comparisons of ReportLab versus XSL-FO/FOP.  How about we help you
redo this and we get some comparison stats over the next couple of
weeks?  Please email me and Steve Holden (sholden@holdenweb.com)
privately and we'll arrange this...


Best Regards,

Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect
ReportLab Inc.




> Hi,
>
> We're in the middle of developing a large ERP system, a big component of
> which is a reporting module. Early on, we chose XSL-FO and FOP to
> automate
> the generation of all our reports into PDF format. (We're using
> FOP because
> it is free: we can't afford expensive commercial systems). We
> have about 250
> reports to do. The data comes from a SQL Server database in an
> XML format.
> Our experience with the 10 or so that we've implemented using FO
> has lead us
> to the following conclusions:
>
> 1. XSL is tedious to program in and difficult to debug.
> 2. Because of the limitations of XSL as a programming language,
> we've had do
> 'pipeline' the processing in certain cases to generate the end-result FO
> file. (XML -> XSL-1 | XSL-2 | XSL-3 -> FO file)
> 3. This makes the development time for a report quite long.
> 4. Reuse of code between reports is difficult or non-existant.
> 5. FOP is slowish. For most of the time, that doesn't matter
> (e.g. it takes
> 5 seconds on a server to generate an invoice). However, we have a
> couple of
> large batch jobs that will process tens of thousands of documents
> that must
> run within a 12 hour period. At 5 seconds per invoice, 20,000 of
> them will
> take 27 hours.
>
> We're currently evaluating other free and open-source tools. We've played
> around with the ReportLabs demos and are impressed, especially with the
> speed of execution, so we're asking if anyone familiar with the
> ReportLabs
> toolkit could give us some advice/pointers.
>
> Our main areas of concern are:
>
> * Reducing development time.
> * Increasing re-use among reports.
> * Increasing speed for batch processing ( although I don't think
> this will
> be an issue from what we've seen)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Felix McAllister.
>
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