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139 All About Adobe ColdFusion 2023 (Part 2: PDF, CCS, SSO, perf, security) with Mark Takata

By Michaela Light Leave a Comment

Mark Takata talks about “All About Adobe ColdFusion 2023 (Part 2: PDF, CCS, SSO, perf, security)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

“…So we decided to build this thing called CCS central configuration server. And it runs at the command line, basically, and allows you to control your servers from a central location.”.

Show notes

Enhanced HTML-to-PDF Conversion

  • New HTML-to-PDF conversion engine
  • Supports new CSS features for pixel perfect PDFs
  • Imbed audio, video and SVG
  • Old tags features for manipulation of PDFs and forms etc still work
  • Increased file size limit by x100
  • Optional future features eg DBX merge / header engine

New PDF Engine and Library Updates

  • Updates several libraries, including Java, Solr, and Hibernate
  • More secure
  • Runs faster

Central Configuration Server (CCS)

  • Simpler management of multiple ColdFusion instances
  • Undo changes
  • “Young” feature, UX a bit hard to set up, easy to use once set up.

SSO CF Admin Integration (SAML/LDAP)

  • Users can log in using their corporate credentials with SSO (Single Sign On)
  • Pin point access to parts of CF Admin
  • Groups support

Performance optimizations to the ColdFusion engine.

  • ACF 2023 came with Java 17 update which broke some security issues
  • Cause initial slower in first release
  • Was speed up with hotfixes. 
  • Future improvements in ACF 2024

Enhanced security features and protocols.

  • SSO
  • Java 17
  • Protect logs

Integration with new technologies and frameworks.

  • Updated libraries used by CF

Improved support for cloud platforms and services.

Developer tools and IDE enhancements.

Accessibility improvements.

Security, Stability, RAD and performance

Bug fixes and stability enhancements.

Annual release cycle and ACF 2024 beta

  • Features fully defined and beta for show at CF Summit West (Las Vegas) in October 2024
  • Better keep up with changing tech eg AI

Why are you proud to use CF?

  • He built his entire career on CF
    • Has professional used 13 other languages too and always comes back to CF
    • Can explain why CF compared to other programming languages
  • RAD – fast prototyping
  • CF is growing
  • More CF jobs
  • Hack and code in CFML 40 lessons
  • Junior devs now asking about CF
  • Easier to learn esp for anyone knows JavaScript
  • Modern ecosystem

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

  • TryCF
  • Mark’s learning resources – ask him
  • CF Community
  • Talk about CF a local dev meetup
  • Education
    • CF Summit East announcements coming up

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit East?

Mentioned in this episode

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Bio

Mark Takata

Mark Takata

Senior ColdFusion Technical Evangelist

Mark Takata is Adobe’s Senior Technical Evangelist for ColdFusion. With more than 25 years of experience in the tech industry, Mark brings a deep knowledge of programming, design, and his love for mentorship to this role, where he is the main touchpoint for the CF community.

Links

Interview transcript

Michaela Light 1:34
So I think we should move on to PDFs because a lot of enterprises you know, need to produce PDFs, either reports or, you know, other cute PDF stuff. And there's two major enhancements here. First of all, how you can create pixel perfect PDFs, which sound very sexy, particularly if you're producing things like tax forms or other forms that must be absolutely perfect. And then I think you did some under the hood stuff too. So tell us about what the you know, you've got this HTML to PDF version feature

Mark Takata 2:08
All right. So in fact, all of those things are all coming from the same location, which is the new engine that we put in, the old engine that we had in there was really not brought up to date very much, or very often over the years, it had gotten a little bit long in the tooth, it still worked fine for the things that it did. But things like HTML, CSS, they kind of moved on without it. And so it didn't support things like, you know, CSS Grid, or Flexbox, or all of these new features that allow you to really position things exactly the way that you want them. So to make these pixel perfect pages, say that sometimes fast, you needed to do all sorts of stupid web tricks, right? And it was frustrating and annoying. And I was one of those people I made so many reports, I lost track years and years ago. And you know, you had to do these silly little things like add a pixel here. And then why didn't the pixel to make it so that this line lined up? Right? It was just annoying. And to be fair, every reporting system on the planet that I've ever used had this problem. So this was not necessarily anything new. But you know, we felt that we could do better. So this new engine improves all of those things. So now when you output something, it looks the same in the PDF as it looks on your screen in the browser. Pixel Perfect. Oh, I don't hear you.

Michaela Light 3:35
I muted myself, I was shocked, I was so shocked, I had to meet myself. No, but that's great that it can look the same in the browser as as in the PDF, and that makes doing creating PDFs so much easier. Because, yeah, and all your tricks and all your designers to to make it look great. On the webpage,

Mark Takata 3:58
I actually had a really, there was a really neat use case that I saw that I had never thought of and you mentioned tax forms, and government forms and things like that, which are super important. I know, you know, most of the government uses ColdFusion Sure, everyone knows that, you know, Social Security Administration, and NSA, all those guys use it. But this one company was so excited about this feature, because the thing that they do is they actually will get invoices. So you know, people buy stuff from them, they'll get an invoice and the invoice is something went wrong, right? Somebody ordered 20 reams of paper, but the invoice said 21 or whatever. And they had to regenerate the invoice but because it was they did work with the government, they had to alter the the invoice that was coming if or something along those lines, it needed to be exactly the same as the invoice because they had it recorded. And then they were going to add this as a new version. And it had to like match up. So they were able to use this engine to generate an identical pixel perfect copy of the old version with just the change that they needed, the number of the invoices, the price or whatever. And it worked seamlessly out of the box first time, and they were just blown away. I mean, like that was they had been waiting for this forever. They tried like other external PDF generators, and no one else was quite able to do it this way. But here, it's a tag, it's it's enough PDF, you create your HTML, the way you want it to look, boom, it outputs to, to what you need. So yeah, that's, that's a really big deal. It also added a bunch of support for things like you can embed audio and video that's new, and really cool. It doesn't work. If you print it, though, just know. I tried really hard to get him to do that. But, um, and it also supports SVG. Which, as you might know, SVG is scalable, scalable vector graphics. And that, that allows you to have like things like logos, or photographs, or pictures or architectural diagrams, or whatever. And you can scale them to nearly any size. And they're used by a lot of people in a lot of different industries, and we just have not had any kind of support for them at all. Now we do. And again, it's it's about pixel perfection, right? Like, because those are, you know, if you're familiar with vector graphics, they don't have pixels, they describe the size of the lines, the width of the lines, the alignment of the lines to each other, all of that. So you can scale it to the size of a building or, you know, the size of something you'd print on a pen. Yeah, and it should still work across both of them.

Michaela Light 6:44
So those and you still have all the the old tanks for you know, manipulating PDFs merging different files into one PDF or PDF forms or, yeah,

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Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers.

Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.

 

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