I've been introduced to this wonderful project, xhtmlrenderer; the flying saucer project. Problem is, is that where I work, it's strictly a microsoft shop and I haven't done any java development since college, and a smidge of WebSphere a few years back.
I was wondering what it takes these days to do java development? I set up a quick proof of concept to see if I could do what I wanted with this project and it works great, however, I used jnbridge whose licenses are a bit on the expensive side but Visual Studio was what I had handy and got the job done with an hour of finagling.
I'm wondering what it take to do java development these days? Are servlets still the norm? Is Apache where I should start looking to get a small web server up and running? Is Eclipse/Ganymede the IDE to use?
Essentially what I want to do is pass a url to the service and have it spit back out a PDF. Just on vacation right now, and stuck on dial up, but can't stop thinking about this.
Thought I'd post these thoughts now to see if I can get a jump start on next weeks work.
Eclipse is certainly the IDE on no budget, NetBeans is also free. I prefer IDEA from Intellij, but for something that sounds like such a side part of your project, it probably isn't worth the money.
In terms of servlets, etc., it really depends on the archetecture/scalability you are looking for.
If you are looking for something that needs to run as a small web interface, then something like Jetty or Tomcat with a basic servlet should be fine.
You might be looking at something invoked via the command line, although starting a JVM for every conversion is going to be too heavy for all but the most trivial usages, but a little program that monitors a directory and pulls stuff out of it for the conversion may be what you need.
If you give more details about the archetecture and how you are planing to use it you could get some more specific advice.
In general .NET and Java development are quite similar (.NET was started to compete directly with Java, after all), but the real practical difference is that a lot of the .NET environment is kind of provided to you on a silver platter. You need a web container, you have IIS, you need a database, you have MS-SQL, You need an IDE, you have Visual Studio, etc., etc. In Java development, these are all choices to be made, there isn't really a default obvious good choice for a lot of things - there are many competitors. That can create a larger curve for a Microsoft shop than you are expecting.