350 Nice

FaxIt Nice’s document conversion system has been supported on the back end by OpenOffice.org since the very first day we went into business. “OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project.” We received major help in this integration in our first release from Caolan Mc Namara, one of the developers of OpenOffice, for which we are truly thankful.

This time round, in FaxIt Nice 3.0 we streamlined our integration a little more thanks to a component named JODConverter, provided by “Art of Solving” a software house / IT consultancy firm run by Mirko Nasato in London, U.K.

JODConverter is a lightweight, java based, document converter which sits between FaxIt Nice and an OpenOffice headless server. It does all the heavy lifting as regards initial conversion of office files to PDF format, we then convert those PDFs to TIFF for transmission over the telephony network as faxes. It is provided in a few different guises for ease of integration by java developers. A command line tool, a web application which can be deployed to Tomcat or any other servlet container and a single jar file. I opted to use the jar file, dropped it into my project and started bashing away at it. Within a day, i had a working prototype and knew i was on the right road to solving a lot of document conversion issues we were having with our old Zope based solution.

I’d like to take this chance to compliment Mirko on his simple, elegant solution. This system is much more reliable than our previous dependence on pyUNO and also much, much simpler to maintain. If you have a need to convert office documents to PDF in your java app then JODConverter + OpenOffice is definately the way to go.