PDFTron - What is backend?

1
votes

The PDFTron developer guide says that

WebViewer supports two document backends. It can view PDF documents directly using the PDFNetJS backend and it can support viewing a wide range of document file formats (including PDF) by converting all documents to the XOD format.

I don't really get what they meant by backend. I checked the samples in both the categories. A few files in PDFJS backend type has included the webviewer.js file but pdfnet is set to true on webviewer initialization. A few other files have included the file PDFNet.js. What do they mean by backend really?

1
pdfpdftron

1 Answers

0
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Great question! First I'll point out this Prezi presentation which has a lot useful high level information. https://prezi.com/view/Aug5ft1twZNNKfBXfTIQ/

What is meant by "backend" in this context, is the client side, document viewing, backend. There are actually three right now: XOD, PDF, and MS Office.

The latter two support viewing PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX, directly client side, with no server component required. Also rendering is done completely by PDFNetJS, supporting the full PDF standard, and no browser+OS specific issues. The downside, is the latter two require a powerful JS engine, or better yet Web Assembly, so older browsers, like IE, and mobile devices are not ideal.

The first backend, XOD, is a web-optimized file format, generated on the server, either on the fly, or beforehand and cached. The XOD backend works great on all device browser combinations, even low end mobile devices. For example, with the XOD backend you can easily view a 1GB PDF school text book on low end devices (as long as they support HTML5 canvas).

Note we are rolling out a new Hybrid solution, using Docker, that will not only handle all this for you, based on the client device, but will include some additional optimizations. Please contact PDFTron sales, or support, team to learn more about it.

In the meantime, you can try out each WebViewer backend on mobile or device, here:

XOD: https://www.pdftron.com/webviewer/demo/samples/basic/index.html?doctype=xod

PDF: https://www.pdftron.com/webviewer/demo/samples/basic/index.html?doctype=pdf

Office: http://pdftron.s3.amazonaws.com/officedemo/officeshowcase/index.html