FOP Reports

The goal of this project is to provide FOP extensions for formatting data-intensive reports. I've called them business reports because they are most likely to be used in an enterprise-application environment to display selected data from various information data stores. The final result of a report is a document that will be either displayed on the screen or printed. The optimal publishing platform is the PDF format, because it ensures an exact representation on both the monitor and the printer, there are specialized readers on any operating systems and is very compact, thus very suitable for internet user. The FOP project at Apache provide a basic framework for transforming XML descriptions of documents into PDF, PS, RTF and some other specific formats.

The basic FOP schema was extended with elements that support definition of such reports. The extension includes: definition of general parameters, definition of field values from recordsets in a certain relational database, definitions of report-repeating regions as groups and detail. A special parser is used to transform a report definition written using this schema in a regular FOP document definition that can be fed into a regular FOP processor.

Example

• Input XML file: test.xml
• Code for parameter setup: Main.java
• PDF result: test.pdf

Download

• Entire project: Reports.zip
• Report schema: report.xsd

 

Netbeans requirements and release processes

This is a group project done for the 225 Software Processes class in Spring 2002 quarter. The goal of the project is to try to determine a process model for an open source development project. The two particular activities the research was focused on are requirements gathering and the release of new product versions, in the particular case of the Netbeans open source IDE project. The study is based on readily available informations on the Netbeans' website, like email archives, release plans, bug and feature proposals logs.

Download

The report can be downloaded here