I know very little about web services (from the POV of people who know about web services; probably quite a lot if you don't care).

1. I've got a web service what I wrote, in Java (in that I wrote the methods to be exposed, and then invoked the magic tools to turn them into a web service).

2. I wrote a client, in Java (in that I downloaded the descriptor file created by step 1, and invoked the magic tools on it to create helper classes), which invokes the services, and prints some results.

So the concept is basically ok.

3. And then, somebody else at work is trying to access it, using Python. Of course, it goes wrong, or I wouldn't be posting here.

Now, who do I know around here, who knows Python? Or Web services? (The web services is more relevant knowledge...)

( The problemsCollapse )

I'm hoping somebody out there's got a clue about this:
I'm scanning our HR application forms. Each application form is between 4 and 6 pages of A4 (depending on what they want to scan). The end result is a control file, and for each form, a set of TIFF files. These get uploaded into our EDM system. So far so good.

At some later date, the TIFFs are extracted from the EDM and sent to the short-listing panel. The brute force and ignorance technique is simply to give them the TIFF files that were originally uploaded. That might consitute 100 application forms, each at 6 image files. Not the most managable format in the world. My suggestion has been to bundle each set of TIFFs into a single PDF file, so the panel get 100 PDF documents, each relating to a single application.

What I don't know is how to bundle the TIFFs up. Most of the online documentation for conversion to PDF seems to be "set the document up in Word (or your favourite other editor, as appropriate for the content), and then invoke the PDF pseudo-printer." I can't do that, as I need to automate as much of the process as possible.

Instead, I'd much prefer a Java solution, so the end users can create a zip file containing the control file, and all the image files, upload it to the EDM server, which then browses throught the contents, creating PDF files.

The other option I've spotted was A Mac OS X hint to use groff to generate a postscript file, and then ghostscript to convert it to PDF. That might be viable, if I run out of other choices (and I can get groff and ghostview installed on our Solaris servers).

There do, however, seem to be a few java solutions available, but none stand out as being the way to proceed.

Anybody got any experience?

ETA: Turns out the answer to my specific problem is to use Tiff2PDF, which is part of the iText tutorial. Reads multiple images from a single tiff file (or more than one), and combines them at one image per page. It's also very short (at under 100 lines, including the comments, imports, and exception handling), which means I can change it to my requirements (thus I can store the images directly in the EDM and not need file-system or URL access to them).