Hugo Sombreireiro

Adobe launched, today, version 9 of ColdFusion. Check it out at http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

Adobe released today ColdFusion 9 BETA and ColdFusion Builder BETA, the eclipse-based IDE for ColdFusion, tightly integrated with CF9. These are huge news for the CF community.

To download the beta of ColdFusion Builder visit http://www.adobe.com/go/coldfusion_builder_beta_download?sdid=EUSXS

To download the ColdFusion 9 beta, visit http://www.adobe.com/go/coldfusion_beta_download?sdid=EUSXT

There’s this brilliant post by Pablo Varando on how some of his students used several technologies do develop a project, including the “dead” ColdFusion

http://co.ldfusion.com/index.cfm/2009/2/11/ColdFusion-Is-Dead.

I’ll be presenting a CF Insider Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal on March 3rd. We’ll be covering new and exciting features on CF8 and how to use it to deliver engaging apps. If you would like to attend please contact me.

I’ll be presenting a CF Insider Workshop in Barcelona, Spain on Feb 27th. We’ll be covering new and exciting features on CF8 and how to use it to deliver engaging apps. If you would like to attend please contact me.

We’re creating CFPortugal, the Portuguese ColdFusion User Group, with Adobe support. The site will be cfportugal.org and will be available quite soon!

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.

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

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)#">