Tried out iText sometime back for creating PDFs in a J2EE app (ADF 10.1.3 to be specific). It’s a fabulous tool. From my initial read up, pdf layouts will be a bit pain to create as the component tree has to be programatically created. I didn’t need to do layouts so I may have missed out easier ways of doing that. For my use-case, I had pre-built PDFs with AcroForms. With iText, it’s quite easy to fill in the fields in the AcroForm and save a copy. All in a few lines of code. If you have to create/edit PDFs in your Java application, iText is the best thing out there.