Laurens over at prepressure.com has nice short history of the JDF standard. I have a little bit of personal history in this because for about two years at Creo, in the late 1990s, I was the chief technician responsible for hooking up Prinergy to various third-party output devices. That role later morphed into a manager position where I helped hooked up Prinergy to Dolevs and the Lotem Quantum, which was the successful attempt to put a Creo thermal head into the Lotem automated CTP.
Anyways, I remember the first iteration of JDF coming out and the Creo developers looking at the spec and thinking it was so damn loose, that implementing it would be a support nightmare. So the Network Graphic Production or NGP implementation was written up. But by then Creo was in the middle of the Printcafe nightmare and that part of the org was supposed to take a leading role in implementing NGP.
Instead, the only leading role that Printcafe took was in screwing Creo shareholders out of a ton of cash. Oh well.
Anyways, so now we have JDF the sequel as well as JMF and I see lots of specs but no implementations in the wild (still).
Maybe I should wait for DRUPA. I mean, it's only been seven years.
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Hi there!
What you mean by:
“I see lots of specs but no implementations in the wild (still).”
Cheers,
Mark
Hi Mark:
I have not seen, anywhere on the internet, a list of output devices that “support JDF.” I am not aware of vendors that boast of their JDF connectivity to other vendors’ devices.
I have not seen any discussion on any forums about JDF connectivity that seemed to be anything other than spec discussions i.e. the theory, not practice.
I am not aware of any successful implementation of JDF connectivity from one vendors’ system to another vendors’ output device.
Basically, it looks to me like the only people who talk about JDF are people who are writing the spec or the vendors. And the vendors are not really talking about the open connectivity of the JDF spec, which is really weird because you would think that would be the main selling feature.
I could be wrong about many maybe all of my comments. Perhaps there is an official list of JDF supported output devices somewhere. Perhaps there are many customer who have a system from one vendor outputting JDF to another vendor’s system that accepts it.
But I can find no evidence of it on the Internet, either via Google or by any discussion forum. And considering the hype of JDF and the length of time that JDF has existed as a spec, I find that mighty curious.
Hello DJ,
I am not surprised that there is no list of output devices that support JDF. An output device is driven by a RIP or workflow so it is the task of that system and not the engine to support JMF and send back status messages to any system interested in such feedback. Any engine or proofer hooked up to a Harlequin RIPs could support JDF. ApogeeX, Prinergy, TrueFlow,… also support JDF/JMF so their pool of output devices theoretically also offer JDF connectivity.
I completely agree with your observation that this doesn’t seem to be happening. I can imagine a number of reasons why this is so, the primary one being the fact that no vendor actually want to sell one half of a solution.
This is true for MIS vendors. Theoretically a company could buy each function that a Management Information System offers from a separate vendor and standards like JDF should make sure all parts talk to each other. That doesn’t happen. If people have separate sales and planning applications, they simply accept the fact that these systems don’t talk to one another and no vendor who has both these modules in his product portfolio will tell them otherwise.
With prepress systems and output devices, the situation is just the same. Vendors are reluctant to cooperate with each other and focus all JDF development on connecting with stuff that is not within their own product portfolio. That is why there are a number of MIS to prepress links but no prepress to prepress connectivity.
Things might be different if there was a huge demand for such mixed solutions. That isn’t true however. I have the impression that printers themselves are quite happy to do one-stop-shopping, even if this means that some parts of such a solution may not be as powerful as an other vendors’ solution.
Hi DJ,
first I want to point out that I fully agree with Laurens statement.
Marktonk claims (http://www.b4print.com/forums/index.php?topic=1093.0) that the Prinect Printready system from Heidelberg has connection to NexPress, HP, Xerox and Canon digital printing machines.
Speaking for NexPress I can ensure that this is true and I have seen several installations (Printready NexPress) around the world. For the others I may not be the best person to comment on
Of course there are several installations (Prinergy -> NexPress) around the world as well. Unfortunately I am not empowered to provide you with a list of customers.
Most probably you should go to Drupa and talk to each and every vendor
If I have the time and the ‘other’ vendors will talk to me I will try to get as much information as possible on this topic.
Cheers,
Mark
Mark, by all means, if you hear of any success stories with JDF, especially with systems of different vendors talking to each other, do not hesitate to share on this blog.
For a brief moment, in the late nineties, it seemed as if we heading towards open systems, which I personally thought to be an excellent thing.
But at present, excluding the exchange of PDF files, it seems everything is proprietary again. It would be nice to see JDF take off.
Dj,
last Drupa (2004) the marketing departements tried to promote the JDF hype.
My personal feeling is that JDF is true for about 18-24 months.
I’ll do my best to get success stories from a wide range of vendors.
Cheers,
Mark