Welcome To ChromeHeadless.io
January 29, 2019
KoolPHP Inc is very happy to start this new line of business. ChromeHeadless.io will utilize Headless Chrome to provide cloud services such as PDF Exporting and Web Crawling. For the first start, we focus on the PDF exporting service.
Why ChomeHeadless.io?
Back to Jan 2017, we have created KoolReport, an open-source reporting framework for PHP. KoolReport has been adopted by thousand developers all over the world to construct great data report. Exporting to PDF is an essential demand so we created a package called Export to help developer generate PDF from their report. Under the hood, we use PhantomJS, a headless browser to read report in HTML and finally save them to PDF. The advantages are many and the most important one is the ability to execute javascript. This opens the opportunity to generate PDF report containing modern charts such as Google Chart, ChartJs and others. However using PhantomJs has some draw backs:
- Installation problems: Many of our users have difficulty to install PhantomJS on their system. Some of them use shared hosting and do not even have right to do installation.
- Font issue: PhantomJS uses limited set of fonts which is very hard to print PDF with correct font type in the original report.
- Not supported any more: PhantomJs has stopped its development.
- Comsume large resources: PhantomJS is heavy and consume a lot CPU power and RAM to execute.
Headless Chrome savior
By the time PhantomJs ceased its development, Google has released Headless Chrome starting from version 59. Headless Chrome has several advantages compared to PhantomJS:
- Backed by Google: Chrome has taken 60% of browser's usage in the world and Headless Chrome is the stardard.
- Less CPUs and RAM: Testing cases show that Headless Chrome take only half of resources required by PhantomJs to produce same result. Headless Chrome still take alot of resources but at least is better.
- Efficiency: Loading webpage and generating PDF is much faster than PhantomJs.
- Better fonts: Headless Chrome support wider range of fonts.
How our service work?
Our service is provided through REST APIs so virtually it can be used with any language and system. For convenience, we are constructing the client library for each of languages such as PHP. NodeJs, .Net and Python. So if you are using those languages, you may install the client library and provide it with your secret token created from your registered account. The client library will compress your HTML together with resources such as CSS and Javascript and send over to our server farms to generate PDF version. The high definition PDF will be sent back to you.
Advantages
There are number of advantages of using our system:
- No installation required: You do not have to install PhantomJS or Headless Chrome.
- Off-load heavy task: Headless Chrome or PhantomJS required certain amount of CPUs and RAM which you may reserve for other crucial tasks. Beside your CPUs and RAM may not be optimized for this tasks which may affect the efficiency. Our system contains a farm of servers which is highly optimized so we can perform this tasks faster and better.
- Avoid complicated interface: You may avoid unnecessarily complicated coding to control headless browser.
- Everything works smoothly: We will take care to make sure that your PDFs generated nicely,all fonts are working so that you can spend more time concentrate on your application rather than be bugged with Headless Chrome issues.
Our advantages over other similar PDF cloud services
We have studied well other services before we decided to move on with our services, here are some of our advantages over them:
- Some of them do not execute Javascript, only converting pure HTML to PDF but WE DO!
- Many of them requires your application be online so if your application is in localhost or intranet their solution will not work but WE DO! By analyzing your content and gather all related resources CSS, Javascript, fonts to send together, WE BEAT THEM!
About us
KoolPHP Inc has been in business for 10 years, we focus on building the featured rich yet easy-to-use components to help developers increase productivity and deliver highest quality applications within time and budget constraints. Our main products are KoolPHP UI and KoolReport. KoolPHP UI is a toolset for developer to construct web faster while KoolReport is an open-source reporting framework to build data reports and dashboard easier.
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