Mike Potter

July 07, 2006

LiveCycle, PDF and Open Source

A few blog entries ago, I explained why I thought the release of Flex was good for open source developers.  One of the comments, from Will Pollard, asked for clarification on how LiveCycle fits with Flex and open source.  In particular, why would someone use LiveCycle as opposed to any of the free PDF creation tools that are out there. 

To start with, LiveCycle is a bit more difficult to access than Flex... Unlike Flex, you cannot download trial versions of the Adobe LiveCycle server products.  (You can download a trial version Adobe LiveCycle Designer and start building out PDF forms.)  Currently you need to be a member of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to download the LiveCycle software, including the very easy to setup LiveCycle Toolbox.  (The toolbox is a pre-confirued install of all the LiveCycle software.  For an explanation of LiveCycle, check out this Breeze presenation I did for Adobe Developer Week.)

We do want to make LiveCycle more accessible to developers.

To understand how LiveCycle competes with open source PDF creation tools, its important to understand that there are two types of PDF documents: what I call static PDF documents and dynamic PDF documents.  Static forms are created in Acrobat, and are sometimes referred to as "AcroForms".  The PDF file is static (it does not grow or shrink in size), but in Acrobat or Adobe Reader it may contain interactive elements that people can fill out electronically.  For example, if you had an invoice, you would create the template with a set number of rows, and then hope that someone didn't order more items than the number of rows on the document.

On the other hand, dynamic PDF forms can grow or shrink in size depending on the data that is bound to the form.  So, say you have an invoice for products, it could be 1 page for 1 customer, and 10 pages for another customer who orders a lot of items.  To build that, you use LiveCycle Designer and create a PDF form, then use LiveCycle Forms to bind the data (likely in XML format) to the form.  Most of the free, open source tools out there do not handle this type of PDF document.  In fact, I haven't seen any solutions that do this, other than the Adobe LiveCycle set of products.

So, the question now becomes how does Flex fit into this?  The idea is that you would use a Flex front end to gather data, likely on a website.  At some point, you may want to continue filling in the form offline, or send the data to other people.  When the time comes to take that data offline, you pass the data to a PDF form (which was created with LiveCycle Designer), and then users are able to access that data in a PDF document.  They can send it to friends, do offline collaboration etc... When the time comes to send the data back to the organization's servers, a user would hit the submit button in the form and the data would be sent back to LiveCycle Forms, which will extract the data from the PDF form and allow the organization to process the data.

Once the data is in the PDF form, there are other LiveCycle pieces that may be of use as well.  Digital signatures, policy protecting that information, managing the form's workflow are all services that the LiveCycle set of products provides.  In the above example, I've focused only on taking the data off line, but once it is off line, the other LiveCycle products add additional functionality to the document / form.

technorati tags:livecycle, adobe, opensource, acrobat, flex

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August 29, 2005

Beta test the next generation of Distiller / Elements Server

Adobe Distiller Server and Adobe Elements Server are being replaced by a new product called LiveCycle PDF Generator. The beta program for that product is now accepting applicants. If you want to test out the next generation PDF conversion product from Adobe, you can join in on the beta program. You'll be among the first to check out our next gen server side PDF generation product, and we'll use your feedback to help improve the product and documentation. Before applying, I'll warn you that you should know something about application servers, since you may be required to install or maintain one in order to run LiveCycle PDF Generator.