Web Architecture, Web Production, Web Marketing

I’m having a heck of a time using pdf document variables in CF 8.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.5 and Redhat Linux ES 5.  Those are the only platforms I have to test cf with so perhaps this is a windows issue as well.

From Adobe’s IsPDFObject documentation, I’ve taken their example of reading in a file as a pdf object and writing it out.  I’ve even gone the extra step of making sure cf thinks the input file is a valid pdf.


<cfif IsPDFFile("filein.pdf")>
<cfpdf source="filein.pdf" action="read" name="myPDFform"/>
<cfif IsPDFObject(myPDFform)>
<cfpdf source=#myPDFform# action="write" destination = "fileout.pdf">
<cfelse>
<p>This is not a PDF.</p>
</cfif>
</cfif>


CF thinks the file is a pdf, it reads the file, it thinks the pdf document variable is valid, then when it tries to write, I get an error:


The file or directory (/Library/WebServer/Documents/coldfusion.pdf.PDFDocWrapper@1547134d) specified in the source attribute in the CFPDF tag does not exist.

The error occurred in /Library/WebServer/Documents/test.cfm: line 4

2 : <cfpdf source="filein.pdf" action="read" name="myPDFform"/>
3 : <cfif IsPDFObject(myPDFform)>
4 : <cfpdf source=#myPDFform# action="write" destination = "fileout.pdf">
5 : <cfelse>
6 : <p>This is not a PDF.</p>

Given where CF seems to be generating a temp file I could see this being a problem on my Linux box where cf can’t write to the webroot.  That would not be a problem on my local dev environment though where I can write to the webroot.  On both machines I can successfully access pdf files themselves and write to different files to add watermarks, get and set info, etc.  I just cannot work with the pdf document variable at all.  The last pdf file I tested with here was the CF 8.0.1 release notes from Adobe at around 250k.

When I get a solution to this issue, I’ll post it.  If anyone has any thoughts here I’m all ears.  Hopefully someone can point out that I’m doing something stupid and share a correction.  Otherwise I’ll submit a bug to Adobe.

I’m new to Flex but still enjoyed the Mate framework presentation from Laura at asfusion.com.  I know that I need to think ahead of time how I’m going to organize all the events in my application.   This could simply be a design pattern.  The Mate framework has the idea of an Event Map to organize events in a central location.  Larger applications with multiple function sets can have multiple event maps.  I like how Mate and the Event Maps are organized.  I don’t feel like there would be much of an additional learning curve to start using Mate.  It looks pretty lightweight too.

If you’re looking into Flex, Mate is worth a look.  The site is well organized and has solid documentation so far.  This alpha version of Mate has well written, clear documentation and an api reference.  The documentation for users of many frameworks and apps is clearly an afterthought.  I really appreciate the Mate team spending time on their docs.  Additionally, I’ve enjoyed hacking up the FlickrBook example app to get a good idea for what’s going on with Mate.

cfvideo scenes

I think the idea of a cfvideo tag would be a solid feature for the future. In particular I’ve wanted to be able to pull off something with streaming video like is done on ted.com. The overlay at the bottom of each video that shows scene markings is very useful. It would be nice if as a developer or content producer if all I needed for navigation within a video were timecodes and optional chapter/scene titles.

cfvideo subtitles

I have a use right now for being able to programatically add subtitle overlays to video files. The anatomyofchristianity.org wordpress blog I developed has flash videos that I would like to integrate Bible references into at specific times. I already need to make a list of the timecodes and references. If I could just take that list and feed it into a script, that would save me tons of time of using Final Cut for busy work.

cfvideo tag for lazy amateur editors

Storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, cameras are cheap. By the time CF9 is released, the cost of storage, bandwidth and cameras will open up working with video to a huge market. Video files will only get bigger and more irrelevant. Something like the iMovie 08 takes a step at making simple editing for lazy amateur editors but that’s still too much for some people. Being able to have a cfvideo tag that could make cuts, even if they were non destructive for performance enhancement could go a long way in making some cool webapps.

cfvideo transcoding with user specified tools

I don’t think adobe would be able to provide a solid transcoding product without getting into a nightmare of licensing issues. Maybe I’m wrong. It would be nice to just specific some arguments and point cfvideo to ffmpeg for example.

Here’s some notes I took from the cfObjective community giving feature requests to the Adobe team for ColdFusion 9. This list is incomplete. Some requests were hard to catch and I came in a bit late. But here’s a bunch that were talked about. I’m bolding items I felt were particularly well received. Of course, this is totally subjective.

• parse action script 3 natively within coldfusion (compile it into java) … there was passionate discussion here, in my opinion though it seems very difficult and something that wouldn’t provide enough short term profit for the effort.  I could be missing the big picture though.
• ability to throw exceptions in cfscript
• cfscript should do all of the language construct
• ktml support for rich text editor … ktml sounds doubtful as this is a retired product
• ability to flatten pdf forms, so forms can be created, sent to customer and customers cannot edit.
• add <cffinally> tag as in try, catch, finally
• transaction managers for nested transactions
• a packaging system to easily distribute cf apps as single file, like java has jar files
• tags that generate html would have the capability to use html 4.01 strict not just xhtml
• compress javascript files
• cfhtmlfoot tag to write content immediately before closing html tag
• onrequstend that stops breaking cfcs … I may have misheard this one
• trusted cache and turn it on or off per application
• being able to cache parts of a page only
• ability to strip down whitespace so html is a single line, aggressive whitespace management
• name elements by attributes and be able to clear specific elements in cache
• be able to cache something until change
• better dealing with null values
• info in server monitor about unit tests of code to show code quality to management
• ability to script to photoshop, indesign
• hibernate, jpa, orm integration
• cfvideo tag like cfimage, ability to add chapters or cut longer video into clips

The word wrap and selection wrap support in Eclipse leaves a bit to be desired. The biggest problem for me is that I can’t remember how to do even do it in a default install. I think there’s something in the editor config but it’s difficult to find and I always forget where it is.

I recently found this script for Wrapping Text using Eclipse Monkey. It’s some simple javascript that does hard wrapping around a certain number of characters per line. It pays attention to words and will insure that your lines never go beyond a particular column width.

This solution works for my particular needs of having to past in some content from Firefox into html files in Eclipse. Firefox doesn’t pay attention to the line brakes in the copying process so I end up getting some huge, ugly looking lines in Eclipse. For html output, the hard wrap of lines, with a return after each line is fine. If you’re using the CFEclipse plugin for Eclipse, there’s an icon in the tool bar that allows for soft wrapping of the text. This is really the best way to go for non-destructive wrapping. But that does assume you’re using CFEclipse and in that view. Outside of that, this script using the Eclipse Monkey plugin is a big help.

Eclipse Monkey, Project Dash is sweet. It basically allows you to build plugins into the Eclipse interface using javascript, offering clean menu integration and hotkey support right out of the box. I’ve spent all of 10 minutes thusfar with Eclipse Monkey, have installed this word wrap script and already have some other ideas of scripts I could pull off quickly.

In tuning a server I came across an interesting note in this MySQL Optimization presentation on the mysql site.

If you run the client and MySQL server on the same machine, use sockets instead of TCP/IP when connecting to MySQL (this can give you up to a 7.5 % improvement). You can do this by specifying no hostname or localhost when connecting to the MySQL server.

In setting up this server, I thought I had a good idea in setting all the hostnames in the data source connections to 127.0.0.1.  I assumed the server wouldn’t have to do the extra translation of a hostname to an ip address.  Sure enough it looks like this does more harm than good by forcing a tcp connection.

I’ve got CF8 running in single server mode on my MacBook. I also recently installed VMware Fusion for virtual machine support. Running virtual machines creates separate lan networks on your system which can raise some networking issues with things like vpn’s and servers you may run that broadcast to all available ip addresses. JRun for running ColdFusion turned out to be one such problem server.

By default JRun tries to broadcast itself to all available ip addresses. You can verify your setup by checking your jrun.xml file around line 385.

<attribute name="deactivated">false</attribute>
<attribute name="interface">*</attribute>
<attribute name="port">51800</attribute>

That star tells jrun to broadcast itself to all ip addresses hooked up on the machine. I’ve even seen it crash trying to broadcast to a fake ip assigned to the firewire port (think that one’s an Apple bug).

Anyway, there’s really no need for most of us to broadcast to anything but 127.0.0.1, your localhost. So change that star to 127.0.0.1 so that the complete line reads:

<attribute name="interface">127.0.0.1</attribute>

Hopefully this will save you a headache, if not now than in the future if you start adding networks to your machine.

After installing Plesk 8 on a RedHat 4 box I’ve needed to install Plesk 8 on Redhat 5.  RedHat 5 uses mod_jrun22.  Well it’s Apache 2.2 that uses mod_jrun22, so any version of Linux running Apache 2.2 will use this connector.

Since Plesk doesn’t support CF8 yet, it still writes out its apache directives looking for mod_jrun20.  This needs to be modified to get per domain support for CF8 and Apache 2.2

Warning this will void your warranty!

I grepped the plesk install directory looking for mentions of jrun.  I found a binary file that matched: /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng

Looking at this file, on line 228 there’s a mention of mod_jrun20 in plain text.  This is the part of the websrvmng that writes out the http directives.  After making a backup of this file I took a chance at making an edit.  I simply changed mod_jrun20 to mod_jrun22 and saved the file.

Sure enough, plesk is happy.  Now when checking the ColdFusion box in a domain setup I see <IfModule mod_jrun22.c> in the httpd.include file for that domain rather than <IfModule mod_jrun20.c>.

Be careful here, I’m sure this change would not survive a plesk update to websrvmng.  After each plesk update double check this file to make sure it still points to mod_jrun22.

By default the Plesk control panel does not work with ColdFusion 8 yet. It sounds like official support will be available in Q1 of ‘08. I couldn’t wait that long. I’ve been able to get Plesk 8 to work with ColdFusion 8 to a degree.

I assume you’re familiar with how to install both separately so I’ll just be going over how to get both to play together.

In my world the Plesk control panel is just used simply used so that staff in our small software company can manage websites and not need to use a shell. No one else even has access to Plesk. Because of this, separation and security are not primary concerns. Also, I have no need to let anyone or myself manage CF DSN’s from within Plesk, being able to do this in CF Admin is fine.

So what I’ve done is enable the ColdFusion checkbox used when setting up a website so that CF code can be used on a particular website. Any ColdFusion management capabilities of Plesk are not enabled.

[root@yadda]# /usr/local/psa/bin/cfsetting -s /opt/coldfusion8
I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/opt/coldfusion8/runtime/servers/default/SERVER-INF/jrun.xml"
Config not parsed successfully.

Running that cfsetting command with the -s switch and the cf root from the commandline showed me an error plesk was running into. I found jrun.xml in a different place.

/opt/coldfusion8/runtime/servers/coldfusion/SERVER-INF/jrun.xml

Since I think jrun.xml should be pretty much the same from CF7 to CF8, I’m going to just try pointing Plesk to the right place with a simlink.

cd /opt/coldfusion8/runtime/servers/ && ln -s coldfusion default

Now I run the cfsetting command again.

/usr/local/psa/bin/cfsetting -s /opt/coldfusion8

Now I notice when starting up Apache that it’s trying to startup mod_jrun twice. In my ColdFusion install I selected to build a mod_jrun connector to hook into Apache during the install. Turns out that this conflicts with Plesk. It’s a simple fix. Just fire up your httpd.conf file and look for all instances of cfm or jrun. You should see these entries toward the bottom of the file. Just comment out the whole block of stuff by putting a hash sign in from of the lines. Or you could always delete this stuff if you want.

For each website that you enable ColdFusion support for you should see this code in the httpd.include file for the site.

JRunConfig Verbose false
JRunConfig Apialloc false
JRunConfig Ignoresuffixmap false
JRunConfig Serverstore /opt/coldfusion8/runtime/lib/wsconfig/psa/jrunserver.store
JRunConfig Bootstrap 127.0.0.1:51800
AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm .cfml .cfc

If you need to do a little troubleshooting, just make sure that you don’t see code like this in any of the global config files for apache. As well make sure your jrunserver.store file exists. And make sure you’re loading the mod_jrun module somewhere. Plesk should drop this into zz010_psa_httpd.conf in the conf.d folder. Make sure that exists: LoadModule jrun_module /opt/coldfusion8/runtime/lib/wsconfig/psa/mod_jrun20.so. And lastly, double check your jrun.xml file you should see a mention of jrun broadcasting on port 51800 … you should see that in the jrun.servlet.jrpp.JRunProxyService block of the jrun.xml file. It’s possible that jrun is running on a different port, if that’s the case you’ll need to change it to 51800. Or somehow find out how to change the Plesk default.

If you have any troubles, post a comment here and I’ll see if I can help.

I’ve been exclusively using CF8 for development, leaving testing environments on CF7. In some rough testing, I’m clocking the new engine to be about 15 percent faster. I’m still using JRun4 and Java 1.4.2 on my

. I expect even further speed increases on Linux where I do not need to use such an old version of Java. When I’ve bothered to time the improvements, I’m get roughly 15%, yet it feels like more. Much of what I’m doing recently involves working with Fusebox, which when set in developer mode basically recompiles the whole site at every hit. This can get pretty heavy when testing out new stuff. I made the switch on my dev machine to CF8 about midway through the project and do really notice the improvement. So even with the boring stuff like speed enhancements and stability, CF8 is looking well worth it. I look forward to a public launch soon, problems with RC1 have been minor.