Forms at Customs

At the European Customs Union, XEP is integrated in the J2EE environment. For producing forms developers write JSPs containing XHTML. Then there is a servlet filter that converts the XHTML response stream to PDF using the XEP version of CSSToXSLFO. The developers also use it in the reporting service which is mostly employed by batch jobs that produce rather large reports with a tabular layout. These batch jobs in fact generate XHTML, which is again converted with CSSToXSLFO. This approach insulates report programmers from both XSLT and XSL-FO, making them much more productive. This is possible because CSS covers the needs in terms of formatting and can be automatically translated into XSL FO and then to PDF.