Flying Saucer (library)

Flying Saucer (also called XHTML renderer) is a pure Java library for rendering XML, XHTML, and CSS 2.1 content.

It is intended for embedding web-based user interfaces into Java applications, but cannot be used as a general purpose web browser since it does not support HTML.

Thanks to its capability to save rendered XHTML to PDF (using iText), it is often used as a server side library to generate PDF documents. It has extended support for print-related things like pagination and page headers and footers.

History
Flying Saucer was started in 2004 by Joshua Marinacci, who was later hired by Sun Microsystems. It is still an open-source project unrelated to Sun.

Sun Microsystems once planned to include Flying Saucer in F3, the scripting language based on the Java platform which later became JavaFX Script.

Compliance
Flying saucer has very good XHTML markup and CSS 2.1 standards compliance, even in complex cases.