[poppler] JNI interface for poppler

[Thomas Freitag]

Hi all,

I'm wondering a little bit why all threads with the theme "Using poppler 
in java" seems to run in a dead end. Is it
a) because the poppler community has no interests?
b) because the people opening the threads are not willing to work on it?
c) because they are opening new projects which are not supported by poppler?
If a) is the case stop reading, if c) is the case (but I haven't found 
one) I would be really surprised, because it is in the nature of JNI 
interfaces they should be supported by the C/C++ developpers: One good 
reason is that C/C++ interface functions could be changed between 
versions and it is annoying to keep after in this case the poppler 
versions, another good reason is that a lot of C/C++ libraries uses 
error exits / error handler which is hard to support in a JNI library 
(throwing / catching exceptions is nearly impossible in a JNI library, 
an exit would cause the java application to die, too), and at least the 
jpeg library and the lcms library used by poppler have these kind of 
error handler.
If b) is the case, okay, I'm willing to start a JNI project. I'm 
thinking of start with something like the cpp by Pino in Java, but I 
would first like to gather some requests what should be possible in a 
Java interfaces. Another idea could be creating a FOP extension based on 
poppler, I had some bad experiences with using PDFBox, i.e. endless 
loops if I just want to extract the text from a PDF document.

Cheers,
Thomas