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A few years back, while working as an intern for a large corporation, which shall remain anonymous, my responsibility was to maintain a slew of internal tools for HR and operations. Most of these tools were built by interns and contractors over the years with PHP or ASP. While PHP and ASP are immensely powerful, I found most of these internal tools were over engineered. Knowing what I know now, I believe a little PDF scripting would be ideal development platform for internal tools. Here are the top five reasons:

1. Distributed architecture. Acrobat has a full blown JavaScript engine that outstrips most browsers. It allows you to manipulate the form appearance, perform data validation, or even interact with web services and databases natively. With Acrobat being one of the most widely installed applications in the enterprise, it’s a true AJAX platform without the cross-browser compatibility issues.
2. Offline capability. The beauty of the PDF platform is that everything is document oriented, which means you can take it offline, make duplications, email it around, or even print it. The document is a self contained application that can be taken anywhere on any OS.
3. Paper integration. We’ve been pushing paperless office for years, but the fact of matter is that it would take decades to completely phase out paper records. In the meantime, LiveCycle Designer allows you to take any paper form and turn it into a form oriented application with a few lines of scripts.
4. Security considerations. Acrobat and LiveCycle both provide policy control for PDF documents. It’s drop dead easy compare to writing your own policy control mechanisms with PHP. PDF also has native support for digital signatures, which is light years ahead of the password systems used in most web applications.
5. Management buy-in. The PDF platform has a very strong brand loyalty from the enterprise decision makers. It’s perceived by many as one of the most secure and stable platforms. With PDF, you can focus on building your solution instead spending time justifying your platform choice to your boss.

In the next few weeks, I’ll start posting tutorials on PDF scripting. Stefan Cameron has a tutorial on PDF database connection capabilities. Be sure to check it out. If you are looking for a place to start, Alex Mitchell also has a great introductory tutorial.

The Mars Project has just made its first pre-release on Adobe Labs in the past week. For those who are unfamiliar with the project, it’s “an XML-friendly implementation of PDF syntax… incorporates industry standards such as SVG, PNG, JPG, JPG2000, OpenType, Xpath and XML into ZIP-based document container”. I took the liberty of making the following walk-through clip,

I just noticed there was new project on Adobe labs code named “Mars“. It’s a new document format based on SVG. Just like a PDF doc, you can have all the embedded images, objects, annotations etc. all crunched into one document. According to the labs page, there is going to be an Acrobat plug-in that renders the Mars format natively. This new format is very exciting because it’s based on open standards and it’s very easy to work with. Although it’s too early to tell, it does sound like a logical direction for the PDF standard.