Pelco Solutions Blog

Flash Player 10.1 Available

This is not your ordinary incremental update -- Flash Player 10.1 features a lot of important performance and power saving improvements, making this update a must-have for most of us.  If you're on a Mac, a lot of the development effort for this release went towards improving your experience with Flash (sorry, Jobs, you'll have to find a brand new reason / scapegoat to pretend Flash isn't viable for your iPhone/iPad platforms...).

Head over to Adobe's Get Flash page to get the new update.

Another Cool Site Using ColdFusion: Corner Store Comics

I came across the site for Corner Store Comics while looking at this page selling World of Warcraft collectible coin sets... yes, that's right, I said collectible coin sets based on the coinage in the massively popular World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online (MMO) game.

My first thought was, "Really, guys?  Collectible coins based on the in-game currency?"  I'm a huge Blizzard / Warcraft nerd-slash-fanboy, and even I thought this was over the top -- and I'm a guy that bought the WoW-themed plushies for his...ahem... 8-year old daughter; not myself, of course.

But then, while I was ridiculing the product in my guild's forums, secretly wishing I had the money to buy myself a set, I noticed the interesting factoid concerning the site's URL -- yes, it's another site using ColdFusion.  It seems that ColdFusion is popping up in the wild more and more, with all sorts of applications.  I love that fact.  I'm certainly not the only one to notice this, but I'll keep pointing it out, especially when I come across something as interesting as this site and it's nerdy WoW themed coin sets.

Now the real reason for this post is... does anyone want to buy me a set of these coins out of the generosity of their heart?  Obviously, by doing so, you're supporting ColdFusion, and not just feeding into my World of Warcraft obsession!  ;-)

ColdFusion 9 Changed Session Management with CFID & CFTOKEN in URLs

Some years ago, before ColdFusion 9's multi-file Flash based uploader tag, we built our own product to upload multiple files at once, and packaged it as part of our Command Box Share (www.commandboxshare.com) product. No, this blog entry isn't a thinly disguised marketing attempt to get you to go over to that site and sign up -- but feel free if you do like easy file sharing between project users.  ;-)   Rather, an issue that came about with our custom built Flash uploader is what I wanted to mention today.  Basically, with ColdFusion 9, it stopped working in Firefox.

When I initially received the report that our upload tool was no longer working in Firefox, I immediately thought that perhaps an update to Firefox had caused the issue, although that didn't make a lot of sense... the upload tool itself is built in Flash, so it shouldn't matter what browser you're using.  The Flash uploader basically just uploads to a page inside the site, and it shouldn't matter what browser you're dealing with, right?  Sort of...

See, the site requires you to be logged in so that you only have access to your own projects and files.  When we originally built Command Box Share and this Flash tool, we did so in a ColdFusion 8 environment.  Unfortunately, in Firefox, at that time, we noticed that sessions were not being carried over to the upload page by the Flash "client"... essentially, your session would tell ColdFusion that you weren't logged in with the Flash client, and the upload wouldn't work, because behind the scenes, your upload request would be rerouted to a login page.  To remedy this, we did what we thought at the time was a pretty simple fix -- we appended the currently logged in user's CFID and CFTOKEN values to the URL the Flash uploader calls for the upload.  In ColdFusion 8, this worked wonderfully -- with those URL variables in place, the Flash client took on the same session as your browser session, and the upload went though.

Then came CF9.  After troubleshooting for awhile, looking at web log files and coming up with nothing out of the ordinary, it dawned on me that perhaps something goofy was going on with sessions again.  So, I added some simple ColdFusion logging code to the upload page to track the client's session, and viola... I started seeing that the browser and the Flash client in Firefox were reporting different Session CFIDs and CFTOKENs, despite the fact that the upload page was being provided with URL versions of these variables.  I thought this was a bug, until I found the following blurb in the "Managing the client state" ColdFusion 9 Developing CFML Applications Help PDF. 

Note: The behavior is as follows when CFID and CFTOKEN are provided in the URL: If session exists, the CFID and CFTOKEN from the URL are ignored. If the session does not exist, CFID and CFTOKEN from the URL are used to validate the session and the session is used if it is valid. If the session is not valid, a new session is created. CFID and CFTOKEN are regenerated.

Basically, this is changed from ColdFusion 8, and you can test that if you have access to both versions of ColdFusion with a simple "test.cfm" page with the following code:

<cfapplication name="test" sessionmanagement="Yes" setclientcookies="Yes" sessiontimeout="#CreateTimeSpan(0,8,0,0)#">
<cfdump var="#Session#">

Run that page once in Firefox, and then run it again in another browser, to ensure that you're not sharing cookies/sessions.  Take one browser's CFID and CFTOKEN variables, and append them to the other browser's URL like such: test.cfm?CFID=13119&CFTOKEN=45964259  (obviously, substitute these numbers for the numbers shown in your dump).  If you do this on a ColdFusion 8 server, your session will now magically change over to the other browser's session -- you'll have basically changed sessions.  If you do this on a ColdFusion 9 server, you'll note that your session does NOT change, despite the CFID & CFTOKEN URL variables.

Now, is this a bug or broken?  I don't necessarily think so -- the way ColdFusion 9 is handling this now is much safer and more secure.  Hackers can't hijack your session cookie values and theoretically steal away your sessions.  I don't think a lot of that really happened, but still, this change in CF9 removes the chance altogether, apparently.  The only side effect it has is for solutions such as the one we used for Command Box Share, where a legitimate issue caused the need to sort of "assign" a session to the rogue Flash client in order to upload.  I imagine others will likely run into this behind secured sites using the new <CFFILEUPLOAD> tag, too.

What to do then?  Well, I don't think there's really a workaround... rather, until Flash or Firefox somehow fixes the apparent bug with Flash getting its own session, we simply have to rethink how we approach the issue.  For us, with Command Box Share, the solution will be in providing an internal session tracking GUID to Flash to pass on to the upload page so that it knows the Flash uploader is cleared to do its thing.  The alternative, ignoring security altogether and just letting the Flash upload occur without any type of login authentication, is way too risky to consider -- despite the fact that many people do just that, and it's not a good idea.

Let me know if you've seen behavior such as this with your Flash upload applications, and if you solved the issue any differently!

Best Buy Uses ColdFusion

While poking around the Internet this morning, I came across Best Buy's Trade-In site, which is running off of ColdFusion. That's right, Best Buy -- many a geek's favorite store -- also uses ColdFusion.

Just another big name company using our favorite web-based programming language. The days of having to prove ColdFusion's worth and viability as a platform for web application development are over, I think.

Time Warner & NBC Stick With Flash

Several large and influential companies such as Time Warner and NBC Universal have now told Apple that they refuse to abandon Flash for alternatives such as HTML5. The key in these decisions is video delivery, of course, with Hollywood having finally realized the importance of delivering tv shows and movies over the web in the past couple years.

This is obviously a notch in the win column for Adobe, and it'll be interesting to see what kind of response Apple eventually has to the pressure of this news and upcoming Flash-enabled devices that compete with their iPad and iPhone products. Couple these developments with the ongoing scrutiny Apple is receiving from developers and perhaps even the Justice Department itself, and there's still hope that Apple will eventually come to its senses and stop being a thorn in everyone's side over these matters.

Til then, there's always Android and the HP Slate!  ;-)

ColdFusion Security Bulletin & Weird CFDocument Font Sizing Issue

First, for all of you ColdFusion server administrators out there, Adobe's released a new security bulletin and hotfix for a couple of issues.  Be sure to update your instances of ColdFusion on your servers.

Now... onto a weird issue I ran into today concerning the <CFDOCUMENT> tag and embedded fonts.  We're building an app that requires us to generate PDF documents using non-standard fonts.  No problem, right?  The <CFDOCUMENT> tag obviously lets you create PDFs, and using some inline CSS as well as ColdFusion Administrator's Font Management tool, we should be able to define a few font resources in the tool and off we go, right?

Wrong.  At least, not for me, and not today.  Using a font we purchased, I dutifully plugged the font into the CF Administrator's Font Management tool, and used the "Font Family" name in my <CFDOCUMENT>'s inline CSS "font-family" styles.  No problem there.  However, when I went to set the font size, using the font-size attribute or any other combination of CSS such as "font", I ran into problems.

No matter what font size I attempted to set, the font would display in the generated PDF, but the font never changed size -- oddly enough, the line height changed size to accomodate the font size, but the font itself never changed size.  This doesn't occur with any of the "Current System Fonts" listed in CF Administrator; I can embed, use and size those fonts successfully to my heart's content.  But with the user defined font I needed for this project, no dice.

Have any of you experienced this issue?  This is in a ColdFusion 9 installation on Windows.  I plan to go back and try some other custom fonts -- I'm thinking that perhaps something about this particular font was bogus (and I know very little about the mechanics behind fonts, to be truthful!).  I had to move along and just switch the font out to a standard web-safe font, but this was an issue that bugged me, and I thought I'd see if anyone out there had run into the same problem -- I wasn't finding any solutions in the typical ColdFusion community forums or through Google searches.

Apple Prohibits iPhone Development in CS5

The news is several days old now, but it still doesn't make sense:  In a recent release of the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK, there is language that effectively prevents developers from developing iPhone apps in any other code language or compiler other than Apple's own recommended languages and compilers... effectively SLAMMING the door on Adobe's highly publicized CS5 feature for compiling Flash apps into iPhone apps. (And not suprisingly, Apple's new language came only days before CS5's release. Convenient, right?)

This news is upsetting to many developers familiar with the Flash platform looking forward to developing apps for the iPhone in the IDE of their choice.  Rarely are developers limited in the tools they may use to develop apps with, and any rhetoric by Steve Jobs about the changes to the SDK language focusing on keeping app quality at its highest levels is a load of... well... you know what.  The bottom line is, this is a business move specifically targeted at Adobe, but what Apple seemingly has forgotten is that this move alienates a lot of developers who would have been writing quality apps for its platform.  Will these angry developers who sign off on Apple after this move affect Apple's bottom line?  No, but this bitter battle between Apple and Adobe does not serve developers nor consumers alike.

Adobe, for its part, is moving ahead with its launch of Creative Suite 5, noting that the iPhone packager this new SDK language prohibits is just one part of its CS5 feature set.  They have little choice in the matter, of course, with Apple controlling what goes into its app store.  Still, while many developers feel that Apple's ridiculous stance here makes no sense other than the obvious financial gains of controlling its platform, the overall fallout and effects of this stance remains to be seen... no doubt the iPhone and apps for it will still be coming on strong, but these types of moves are changing Apple's reputation and showing some the truth that Apple is also a large corporation with its own self-serving agendas, too...

Other articles on this issue:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175157/Apple_blocks_Adobe_s_iPhone_end_around_plans
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2273-five-rational-arguments-against-apples-331-policy

Wordpress is cool, but did you know...

...that Wordpress is the new Chuck Norris?
...that Wordpress can rebuild the Ozone layer?
...that Wordpress once lifted a car off a baby trapped underneath it?
...that using Wordpress prevents root canals?
...that Wordpress knows all the secrets and mysteries of Lost?
...that by using Wordpress for just 5 minutes 3 times a week, you'll lose 34.8 lbs each week?

If Wordpress sounds like a great option to you, email or call us today at 616.975.9911 and ask for DVS Interactive to get you going on Wordpress -- today could be the start of the rest of your new Wordpress-driven life!

Happy Easter from DVS Interactive!

From the DVS family to your family, we wish you a Happy Easter!  (That's the same as a "Happy Noblegarden" to you WoW fanatics who haven't seen the sun in awhile!) Everyone has their traditions on a day like today, and one of mine is enjoying a Reese's Peanut Butter Egg (or 3)!  Whatever yours is, enjoy it today!

April 12th: Adobe CS5 Launch Date Announced!

The title says it all... today, there is a new countdown timer on Adobe's official CS5 launch site. The timer ends on April 12th... we finally have a date for this highly anticipated release.

Why is this exciting news? For DVS Interactive, it is perhaps most exciting due to Flash Professional CS5.  If this news about CS5 excites you at all, you probably already know about the packager for iPhone that's coming with CS5, which lets you build apps in Flash and then basically export them into a format for the iPhone.  That's really exciting stuff there, and we're about to see an explosion of great iPhone apps as a result.

However, ActionScript developers like myself haven't stopped peeing their pants there -- CS5 also promises a better ActionScript editor, including the long needed ability for custom class hinting and completion -- how I wish I had that this week alone with some of the projects we're working on!

There's a lot more to be excited about, but check the links out for yourself and get ready for April 12th -- I know we'll be ordering a few copies on that first day!  (Seriously, I'm just excited about this great new development tool, and I don't secretly work for Adobe, despite this blog sometimes appearing to say otherwise!)