Viewing .doc file with java applet

Question

I have a web application. I've generated MS Word document in xml format (Word 2003 XML Document) on server side. I need to show this document to a user on a client side using some kind of viewer. So, question is: what libraries I can use to solve this problem? I need an API to view word document on client side using java.

Answer 1

You cannot reliably display a Word document in a web page using Java (or any other simple technology for that matter). There are several commercial libraries out there to render Word, but you will not find these to be easy, cheap or reliable solutions.

What you should do is the following:

(1) Open the Word engine on the server using a .NET program (2) Convert the document to Rich Text using the Word engine (3) Display the rich text either using the RTF Swing widget, or convert to HTML:

String rtf = [your document rich text];
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new StringReader(rtf));

RTFEditorKit rtfKit = new RTFEditorKit();
StyledDocument doc = (StyledDocument) rtfKit.createDefaultDocument();
rtfEdtrKt.read( input, doc, 0 );
input.close();

HTMLEditorKit htmlKit = new HTMLEditorKit();       
StringWriter output = new StringWriter();
htmlKit.write( output, doc, 0, doc.getLength());

String html = output.toString();

The main risk in this approach is that the Word engine will either crash or have a memory leak. For this reason you have to have a mechanism for restarting it periodically and testing it to make sure it is functional and not hogging memory.