Flying Saucer (library)
Java APIs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Flying Saucer (also called XHTML renderer) is a pure Java library for rendering XML, XHTML, and CSS 2.1 content.
| Flying Saucer | |
|---|---|
webpage rendered with Flying Saucer | |
| Stable release | 10.2.0[1]
/ 23 March 2026 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | XHTML / CSS renderer library |
| License | LGPL |
| Website | github |
| Repository | |
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,[2] 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,[3] the scripting language based on the Java platform which later became JavaFX Script.
