Flying Saucer R7 is out

The Flying Saucer team is proud to announce that we have just released version R7 Final.

Flying Saucer is an open source XHTML renderer I started a few years ago here on Java.net. It can render any XHTML + CSS 2.1 document as a Swing component. With the right stylesheet you can actually render any XML document directly. And you aren't just limited to Swing. Some developers are using it to render images and PDF files. I recently wrote an article that describes how you can render full PDFs with pagination, headers, and page numbers.

Release 7 has major, major improvements over the previous release. We've got almost full CSS 2.1 support now; including rewritten floats, tables, and pagination. We also have a brand new CSS parser that is faster, smaller, and more spec compliant (and paves the way for CSS 3 support). You now need only a single jar file, core-renderer.jar, and with Pack200 it's only 345K. If you leave out the entity files and DTDs then it's only 131K with Pack200! There has even been some work to combine Flying Saucer with HTML preprocessors (like JTidy) to render real websites out there in the wild. (minus the Javascript and dynamic layout). Take a look at the screenshot below.

csszengarden-icicle-thumb.png CSS Zen Garden, fully spec compliant

Flying Saucer really is a fantastic way to render XHTML content. It has taken off far beyond what I originally thought when I started it three years ago. I'd especially like to thank Peter Brant for all of his code improvements and to Patrick Wright for taking over as project leader when I had to devote time to other projects.

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Posted July 14th, 2007

Tagged: java.net