The ability to generate rich, personalized PDF documents in real time on a web server can transform business processes and offer new opportunities in almost all industries. As organisations move more and more data into XML, the ability to rapidly convert it to publication-quality PDF has changed from a dream into a growing requirement. Meeting this is our job.

ReportLab's Enterprise Publishing and Reporting Server (EPRS) is a framework for PDF and dynamic Data Graphic development. It offers an extremely flexible, practical and fast route for generating rich PDF documents and data graphics from XML and other data sources.

In a wide variety of situations, EPRS can offer faster development, greater flexibility and higher performance than the traditional XSLT/FOP approach.

Our commercial framework has been in proven use for other 3 years generating real-time fund prospectuses, analysis and a wide range of other documents for clients such as Fidelity Investments (UK). The ReportLab Toolkit, the Open Source PDF library on which it is based, has many thousands of users worldwide ranging from hobbyists to organisations such as NASA and Industrial Light and Magic.

The system is build from a number of modular components:

- The core is Report Markup Language (RML), an XML dialect describing the precise look of a printed document. RML strives for practicality rather than generality, offering a word processor/DTP metaphor, with many high-level conveniences like tags for bar codes or form elements.

- The Diagra graphics framework creates standard charts and custom data graphics in vector format. A chart or graphic can be generated as bitmaps for the web, as drawings within our PDF documents, and as high-quality EPS files for professional printing.

- PageCatcher allows reuse of existing PDF files. Covers, page backdrops and forms can be produced by graphic professionals in tools like Illustrator, distilled and included in a document with one tag, saving valuable development time; form filling applications become trivial.

- Everything is bound together with a templating system (preppy), XML parser (pyRXP), and a collection of data transformation utilities which aim to cover 95% of common needs with extremely simple syntax and the minimum of fuss. Everything is tied together by a high-level scripting language, Python, which gives the whole system an unparalleled macro/extension capability

The session will demonstrate a variety of real-world solutions and how they are put together - including the ReportLab Conference Documentation Kit, which creates the personalized programmes for this conference!