Hello to everybody
This is my first post here, and I must admit: it is quite off-topic. Please don't blame me :)

The question is about architecture. I'm managing a project aimed to rewrite an old software, and I choosed JBoss (for sessions and transactions) + Hibernate + Struts.

Everything fits well in this architecture, except printing: the old software was a distributed app installed on every pc, and printing things like invoices or notes was easy.

Now the new app is a web app, and printing should be made through download of pdf files or similar stuff.
But there is still a strong need to print in a very direct way, I mean without much user interaction. Immagine the user launching a function and, while the browser receives the page, the local printer starts printing, say, a bar code on a thermal paper.
(the heavy industrial environment requires this fast interaction)

In this latter case, moreover, the printer receives plain text, not pdf.

I squeezed my brain, obtaining vague ideas about xml translation (xml document -> xslt -> plain text) and some javascript code to print it.

The question is: what is the right way to do this in a web-centric application?

(having all the local printers shared on the server isn't a good solution)

Many thanks
Enrico

I think you can invoke printing using some javascript or activex stuff. Probably that would be a solution.

If it has to look nice, generate a PDF with libpdf on the server. You can even do this asynchronous and provide the PDF on a Windows/SMB share once it is rendered.

one word about pdf, it is 5 (in general) times more expensive than postcript for a printer server to analyse.
So if you look at doc generation tools, have in mind that, as pdf) ps is generable from XML.
Unfortunatly FOP for example supports PS only in beta version.

Many thanks to you all.
This morning's post and the kind replies made me think over that the answer is the internet printing protocol (IPP), because a browser will never print even a line without user confirmation (imagine the caos if it would be possible)

So, looks like that the official way to print in a web environment is to give any (local) printer an URL, and from the application server simply to send documents to that URL.

Enrico