Hugo Sombreireiro

This year Max Europe will take place in Milan, Italy from December 1st to December 4th. Early bird registration available until September 21st!
For more details visit Max’s website.

Students, faculty and educational institutions can now get ColdFusion for free, pretty much like the Flex Builder program. You can get it at https://freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion.

After a blog sabbatical I’m back to talk about stuff you may or may not be interested in
I downloaded and tested Chrome like half the people in the developer world (maybe a little bit more) and here are my considerations:

- Chrome did crash 8 times under Vista while browsing both flash and non-flash sites
- Chrome was slow as hell running javascript intensive sites
- Chrome was logging every letter I typed in (I then disabled the feature but still….)
- Chrome had flaws in CSS rendering on a couple of sites with certified CSS

In a nutshell that’s my overall impression on Chrome! Needless to say I uninstalled it already!
I’ll give it another try when another version comes out.

Adobe Developer Week presentations are now available for on-demand viewing at the Adobe website! Check them out if you missed any of them or just want to revisit some of that interesting content! Go here!

A new site dedicated to the development of ColdFusion backed Flex application is now online at http://flexcf.com. It carries some interesting content already and more is announced to be available soon. Keep an eye on it

I was really entusiastic when I heard that Adobe had launched AdobeTV, a video content website. So I went there and I was really glad with what I found. People sharing experiences, useful tutorials and case studies and from what I’ve heard there’s a lot more to come. So, I just can’t wait! Check it out here!

CF 8.0.1 brought several updates and features, all of them useful. But to some of my projects there’s one that most people wouldn’t qualify as the must exciting one, for sure. It’s the ability to have CFPDF creating watermarks defined by HTML (or just text).

Previously I’ve used both DDX or iText to cover my needs but the possibility of doing it easily without having to rely on external resources it’s much appreciated both by myself and some of my customers.

And, like everything else in ColdFusion, it’s sooo easy.

For a quick example, on how you can easily create a PDF with text watermark and serve it to your users let’s create a simple a document:

<cfdocument format="pdf" name="somePDFDocument">
<!--- Lets create some paragraphs --->
<cfloop index="x" from="1" to="5">
<p>
Aliquam turpis libero, cursus eu, tristique sit amet, elementum sed, dolor. Duis convallis, velit ut hendrerit pellentesque, eros diam sagittis libero, nec sodales ligula libero sed nunc. Suspendisse tellus lorem, dapibus quis, iaculis et, pretium vel, odio. Vestibulum risus massa, porta non, suscipit et, ullamcorper eget, ligula.
</p>
</cfloop>
</cfdocument>

Ok, so now I can add a watermark saying: “Yay, I can do this now!”:

<cfpdf action="addWatermark" text="<b>Yay I can do this now!</b>" source="somePDFDocument" foreground="true">

And that’s pretty much it! If you feel like or have to you can format your watermark text using cfsavecontent and then just add the variable name to the CFPDF tag like this:

<cfsavecontent variable="myWatermark">
<b>Yay I can do this now!</b>
</cfsavecontent>

<cfpdf action="addWatermark" text="#myWatermark#" source="somePDFDocument" foreground="true">

Obviously you still need to serve the document to the user:

<cfheader name="content-disposition" value="attachment; filename=""newWatermark.pdf"""/>
<cfcontent type="application/pdf" variable="#toBinary(somePDFDocument)#">

Adobe released ColdFusion 8.0.1 yesterday. Among several bug fixes there are some cool new features such as:

• Mac OSX native support
• 64-bit OS support, including XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server, Mac OSX Leopard, RedHat Linux 5, Suse Linux 10 and Solaris 9 & 10
• Enhanced attributes collection
• User interface components upgraded with ExtJS 1.1.1
• Updates to some cfml tags

For a complete list of changes please visit the release docs here.

Among this new cool features there’s one I find to be very useful to me, the new ability to include HTML watermarks directly from cfpdf, without the need to use DDX or iText. I’ll blog about this new feature next.

You can download ColdFusion 8.0.1 updater HERE!

New Atlanta, the makers of BlueDragon CF server announced the release of the J2EE version of their server to the open source community. A commercial version will still be available and NA will still have development control . Additionally the .NET version will remain closed.

This can be good news for ColdFusion since one of the greatest arguments against it has been the price it costs against”free” alternatives. Even if I don’t agree with that being a valid argument, with this move things will change. Unfortunately BlueDragon isn’t 100% compatible with CF and several advanced features delivered in CF8 are not available in BD.

While I think this is a positive move by NA, I think it should have been made by Adobe. Their commitment to open source is becoming more and more of a fact and I think CF becoming open source would, in fact ,be very positive. But lets wait and see, who knows what Adobe holds in its sleeve. That being said, I think the value one most pay for ColdFusion is intirely justifiable and I even think it’s a good business all in all.

In a much deserved recognition Adobe ColdFusion 8 won “Product Excellence Award” in the Web Development category of the 18th Jolt Awards. Finally we get to see this great platform recognized by the industry and another award is always good Check out more here.