Yesterday I asked what server you run Domino on. The result, which is still coming in but unlikely to change significantly, was that an unsurprising majority of you use Windows.

Look again at the chart above. Notice the chart is embedded in a PDF? Look now at the URL. It's a PDF document attached to a Notes document. Both the PDF and the chart within it are generated on-the-fly by a Java WQS agent. Here's the actual PDF generated, which weighs in at a mere 3kb!

The idea is that the survey document has a button on it which you press to have a PDF snapshot of the survey results sent to your email address. The button is hidden at the moment!

This brings me rather nicely to the point of the question itself. The Java code I've written to generate the PDF only runs on Windows. Well, hang on, that's not exactly true. Because the agent generates images it will only run on servers with a "graphics environment". It can run on Linux et al but only if X11 or a similar graphics library is available.

This is the first time in codestore's history that I've produced a demo (a nice one at that, which I'm keen to show off and make available) that I can't actually demo to you. This is because codestore runs on Linux in "headless" mode. There's no graphical interface to the server. The Java code can't create graphics.

At the point I realised this I set about trying to find a way to work round the fact I was being restricted by the OS on the server. What followed was a painful exercise and I ended up giving in after wasting what must amount to days of effort on it.

In looking for a solution I managed to enlist the help of quite a few people. To name a few - Bo Frederiksen, the amazingly kind Simon Delicata (who I tracked down via Google after seeing this posting about the same issue on LDD) and the ever-helpful chaps at Prominic.NET who did everything they could to get it working. In the end none of us could. I thank them all for trying though!

What to do? What I don't want to do is have the hosted version of DEXT be anything less than the fully functional database I want it to be.

The only avenue I have left to explore is to try and use the PJA Toolkit to draw graphics. How much time do I want to invest in learning and re-coding what I've done though? Especially as it will already work for almost 3/4 of you without needing more work. I just don't have that much spare time. Using PJA would make the code more complicated than it really needs to be. It would make more sense to leave it to the minority of you who this wouldn't work for to find your own solution.

So, should I have Prominic.NET move this server to Windows or should I have them run the Domino server from within the X11 environment? I'd asked about the latter but they were hesitant to do so as it eats up extra resources unnecessarily. Right now though that doesn't bother me much. I just want things to work with the simplest form of code possible. I don't like feeling restricted by the environment.

If anybody has an example of using PJA to draw graphics with a Domino server on Linux (with no X11 library code) then I'd be grateful if they'd share it. Or any other advice for that matter. As long as it's not to set "headless=true". That doesn't work. Trust me.