It is no secret that we sometimes use existing, paid libraries, to speed up development process. We do this for some reasons;
Prevent re-inventing the wheel
Time to market
Save time
Decrease number of bugs during the development process
To be fair, VisualCron performs a number of Tasks, which is in all by themselves very complex with detailed control of settings.
In this case we wanted to develop new PDF Tasks, starting with a user request to being able to insert text and/or images into header and footer of existing pdf file.
An important part of the process is to find the right libary for this. For .NET there are at least 20-30 libraries to choose from. We weigh in number of features, location of developer, support options, ease of use, first impressions and price.
Support is vital and a quick question will determine the quality of response and time.
As always, we have free alternatives and free alternatives with less or more complex licensing. Licensing play an important role as we need to get this feature to every build without any extra costs while also protecting our own code and software.
We finally made the decision to use the PDF component from Aspose. What made Aspose different was a number of factors;
The Aspose PDF library efficiently abstracts the programming layer to a high level. While many other, especially free alternatives work, on a lower pixel level, Aspose abstracts this to objects that you work with. This is a fine line as you both want to do something on a high level and at the same time have as many features as possible. Aspose, in this case suceeds in doing this.
The number of Tasks we can build around PDF are all and more that we need right now as their libary is complete which is great in the longer perspective.
Aspose as a company have built a number of different dlls which we might use in the future, for example regarding imaging or OCR libraries. Decreasing the number of vendors that you use are always interesting
The library itself has no other dependencies than .NET itself which was one important thing.
If we would list any downsides and feedback to Aspose it would be the following:
The Support was ok with a 1 day response time. Aspose is located in Australia which is important to think of when raising a question.
We would appreciate during the trial that phone or email support were available – currently you are restricted to forum support.
The price for the Aspose PDF library is quite high compared to competitors but on the other hand it feels complete and well written.
If everything goes according to plan the first PDF Task, for adding footers and headers to new and existing PDF files will be presented in VisualCron 8.0.2. Below are some screenshots of the Task interface.