Flying Saucer (library) explained

Flying Saucer
Screenshot Size:	250px
Operating System:	Cross-platform
Genre:	XHTML / CSS renderer library
License:	LGPL
Website:	github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer

Flying Saucer (also called XHTML renderer) is a pure Java library for rendering XML, XHTML, and CSS 2.1 content.

It is intended for embedding web-based user interfaces into Java applications, but cannot be used as a general purpose web browser since it does not support HTML.

Thanks to its capability to save rendered XHTML to PDF (using iText), it is often used as a server side library to generate PDF documents. It has extended support for print-related things like pagination and page headers and footers.

History

Flying Saucer was started in 2004 by Joshua Marinacci,^[1] who was later hired by Sun Microsystems. It is still an open-source project unrelated to Sun.

Sun Microsystems once planned to include Flying Saucer in F3,^[2] the scripting language based on the Java platform which later became JavaFX Script.

Compliance

Flying saucer has very good XHTML markup and CSS 2.1 standards compliance, even in complex cases.^{[3] [4] [5]}

See also

• JavaFX
• List of web browsers

External links

• Flying Saucer Project Website on Github
• Generate PDF with Flying Saucer
  • Generating PDFs with Java, Flying Saucer and Thymeleaf (Part 1)
• Generating PDFs with Java, Flying Saucer and Thymeleaf (Part 2)

Notes and References

1. Web site: My new opensource project: Flying Saucer, an all Java XHTML renderer. Marinacci. Joshua. 2004-06-14. 2008-06-29. https://web.archive.org/web/20080419145044/http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2004/06/my_new_opensour.html. 2008-04-19. dead.
2. Web site: F3 and HTML . Oliver . Chris . We plan on incorporating the Flying Saucer Java XHTML renderer into F3 eventually . 2006-12-14 . 2008-06-29 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20131214055244/https://blogs.oracle.com/chrisoliver/entry/f3_and_html . 2013-12-14.
3. Web site: Flying Saucer - Default branch. freshmeat.net. 2007-07-14. 2008-06-30.
4. Web site: Flying Saucer R7 is out. Marinacci. Joshua. 2007-07-14. 2008-06-30. https://web.archive.org/web/20080907201812/http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2007/07/flying_saucer_r.html. 2008-09-07. dead.
5. Web site: XHTML/CSS Rendering In Swing. Guy. Romain. 2007-07-16. 2008-06-30.