Tom Jordahl's musings

Adobe Sign - Electronic signatures for everyone.

2019-07-24T16:49:00.001-04:00

I am currently working on Adobe Sign. This is an Enterprise Electronic Signature Service that allows you to upload your document, enter the email addresses of people who need to sign and click send.

You can read more about it here: https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/sign.html

Rancho - code coverage tool for ColdFusion

2012-05-24T09:38:00.001-04:00

Something ColdFusion has been lacking for a while now is a code coverage tool. Now there is an experimental tool available. Its called Rancho and you can read more about it here.

It still has some limitations (covers only tags for instance), but it is a good start and hopefully will be enhanced to become a full fledged tool.

The ADEP Post

2011-10-18T09:49:00.000-04:00

Readers of this Blog might be interested in The ADEP Post. This is an aggregating blog which contains items of interest from around the web concerning the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform and the technologies that make it up.

Quoting from the intro:

The ADEP Post is a human-moderated aggregator of the best user assistance content created by the LiveCycle/Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform community. The community at large includes partners, users, customers, and Adobe professionals.
This blog aggregates content relevant to both the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite as well as the recently-released Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform.

Check it out!

ADEP Data Services for Java EE 4.6 released on Adobe Labs

2011-10-10T13:36:00.000-04:00

As of Monday, October 4 2011 we have made a preview release of the next version of Data Service available up on Adobe Labs.

Some the sweet goodness in this release include:

Adobe Flash® Builder® 4.6, Flex 4.6, AIR and AIR Mobile Support — Build Flex and Flex Mobile applications that run in the browser, desktop or on mobile devices using the very latest cutting edge Adobe technology.
Managed Remoting — Leverage the power of Data Services Data Management features such as inter-client data sync, paging, entity associations and lazy-loading, with the ease of use of Remoting to create powerful data-centric Flex applications. Re-use your existing Java Beans and persistence using simple JPA-based annotations.
Native HTML5 Client SDK — Support for building high performance and very lightweight HTML5/JS applications with Remoting (RPC) and Messaging (push) networking capabilities leveraging HTML5 WebSockets and HTTP AMF channels.
Native Apple iOS Client SDK — Support for building very high performance Apple iOS applications with Remoting (RPC) and Messaging (push) networking capabilities leveraging RTMP and HTTP AMF for online, and Apple Push Notification Network (APN) for offline app support.
Native Android and Java Client SDKs —Support for building very high performance Google Android and Java applications with Remoting (RPC) and Messaging (push) networking capabilities leveraging RTMP and HTTP AMF channels.
.NET Adapters and IIS Plug-ins — Create apps that communicate with server-side .NET code using the new .NET Adapters for Remoting, Messaging, Data Management and MSMQ, or use the all-new native C#-based Microsoft IIS Remoting and Messaging plug-ins to directly access C# server-side code in an all-C# environment.
SAP Connector — Create RIA or Mobile applications that connect to server-side SAP ABAP server. Leveraging powerful Model-Driven Development technology, high performance SAP-backed applications can be created in just minutes and hours versus days, weeks or months.
Spring Support — Leverage the new built-in support for the Spring Framework Servlet and NIO-based channels, including with NIO channels hosted via Data Services Edge Server for DMZ deployments.

Check it out and leave us some feedback on the Labs forums.

MAX 2011 Session available - Whats new in Data Services 4.6

2011-10-10T13:31:00.000-04:00

I have (mostly) recovered from another exciting and tiring Adobe MAX, and I see that my session "Whats new in Data Services 4.6 for Java EE" has been posted on Adobe TV. Since we released our 4.6 Preview release on Monday 3-Oct-2011, everything I talk about in this session is available for download on the Adobe Labs site. Please check it out and give us some feedback.

I had about 60-70 folks in the room and my voice held up pretty well considering I was fighting a killer cough for the entire week.

Lots of other session have been posted as well, check out the Adobe MAX Online site for a complete rundown on the sessions, complete with "Watch Now" buttons for those that have been posted. I do not believe that you need to have attended MAX to watch any of the sessions.

Enjoy!

Brian Kotek on Remoting Call Ordering

2011-09-14T10:40:00.000-04:00

Brian Kotek blogged the result of some experimentation he did with Data Services Remoting (aka RPC) calls from Flex to uncover some relevant information on the ordering of calls from the client to the server.

Read about it in his blog post.

Data Services Sessons at MAX 2011

2011-09-07T13:56:00.000-04:00

MAX is only 4 weeks away! This is going to be another great conference, with tons of new stuff in all areas of Adobe, and in particular the Enterprise software space. Since we have released our new ADEP Experence Server product, there are lots of great sessions to attend to learn all about it.

As for Data Services, make sure you sign up for these sessions:

- Discover What's new in ADEP Experience Services - Data Services with Tom Jordahl: http://t.co/I9sc94l
- Building Enterprise Mobile Applications with ADEP with Mete Atamel and Stacy Young: http://t.co/UKYEaya
- Extending Flex to the Enterprise with Data Services Connectors for .NET and SAP with Matt Butler: http://t.co/xfM0GMS
- Model Driven Development with Flash Builder and ADEP Data Services with Dean Harmon: http://t.co/BSmiKyx

Plus there is going to be our own "ADEP lounge" area for folks to gather, bring questions and problems and generally hang out with the development teams.

See you there!

LiveCycle Data Services 3.1.1 update released!

2011-09-01T13:22:00.000-04:00

We have collected together all of the hotfixes and patches we have made to LCDS 3.1 and released this as LiveCycle Data Services 3.1.1.

You can find this release here.

This release fixes 51 issues on both the client and server. See the readme.txt file in the zip for details on what those fixes are and how to 'install' the update - basically by replacing swc files in your Flex SDK, and jar files to the WEB-INF/lib of your web applications.

Lots of goodness in here. The usual caution applies - test your applications before updating production systems.

The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (formerly LiveCycle ES) now available

2011-08-15T15:00:00.000-04:00

The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform trial is now available on the ADEP Developer Center: http://adobe.ly/getADEP.

What is ADEP you may ask? Well, its a whole bunch of things. The part that I work on (and you are probably interested in) is "Experience Services". This is a whole new architecture based on OSGi that provides a slew of services and solutions for the RIA developer. Deep at the heart of the "Experience Server" is Data Services. In particular, ADEP contains Data Services 4.5. We have plans to release a J2EE version of what will now be named something like "Digital Enterprise Platform - Data Services for JEE" toward the end of this year (2011). The J2EE (does anyone feel strange leaving out the "2"? I can't do it!) version will have a slew of new features (i.e. the 4.5 feature set), including support for multiple clients (Java, iOS, HTML5/JS, Android), Managed Remoting, Spring support and a slew of Model Driven development enhancements.

To get the whole explanation, you can attend my Adobe MAX session: Discover What's new in ADEP Experience Services - Data Services.

If you have any questions or comments about the trial, head over to the new dedicated ADEP forum space here: http://adobe.ly/ADEPForums.

AdobeTV - Introduction to Managed Remoting

2011-06-13T11:39:00.000-04:00

I recently recorded a preview of an exciting new feature that we are working on for the next release of Data Services on J2EE.

Its called Managed Remoting and it applies the power of Data Management to the simplicity of Remoting.

Check it out: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/introduction-to-managed-remoting-in-data-services/

Free RIA training

2011-04-05T17:05:00.001-04:00

I normally don't pass on these kinds on things, but this one could be very nice.

The Adobe Enterprise Developer Program is sponsoring a FREE full week RIA training session in San Francisco April 25-29. They will be presenting an in-depth curriculum including the Flash Builder 4 Crash Course, Data Services Data-Driven Development (that's the stuff I work on!), LiveCycle Collaboration Service, and LiveCycle Mosaic ES2.

This seems like a pretty nice deal and you can't beat the price - FREE!

For more information or to register: http://adobe.ly/eRIASanFran

This space is not intentionally left blank.

2011-01-21T09:52:00.001-05:00

The "Internet is written in ink". This is one of the great lines in "The Social Network", a movie I highly recommend. As someone said at the Golden Globes, Arron Sorkin made people typing at computers look exciting. In the spirit of that, I realize that going months between posting on a blog is a sure fire way to ensure no one will read your blog when you DO have something to say, and that the Tom Jordahl "internet brand" will not be maintained at its high level. :-)

My excuse this time, as it has been before, is I have been heads down making the software. This time the next major release of LiveCycle Data Services, what we will probably call version 4.5. Why 4.5 when the last version was 3.1? Well, because we like confusing folks but mostly because we want to align our version number with Flex in the same way that we align the BlazeDS version numbers already. So before we had Flex 4/BlazeDS 4.0/ LCDS 3.1. Some time this year all the numbers will be the same. So that will be less confusing we hope.

We have some good stuff coming this year, we will continue to build on the Fiber Data Model development paradigm which makes is super simple and fast to define your data model and deploy it to LCDS to get Data Management functionality using Hibernate/JPA persistence without writing any code. We are expanding the Java and ActionScript code we generate from the data model to give you more control and customization abilities in your applications. We are expanding the client options to include Java, HTML5 and various mobile platforms. We have some amazing integration with SAP services. And I have been working on some real nice enhancements to Flash Remoting to make it simpler to develop applications that use the various features of Data Management without having to change from the RPC-style of thinking.

I hope to be able to post more about these great new features in 2011.

Speaking at RIA Unleashed Boston - Nov 11-12, 2010

2010-11-01T13:33:00.000-04:00

I have been scheduled to talk at RIA Unleashed this year in Boston. I will be talking about (and showing some demos) the upcoming LCDS-Next release support for non-Flash clients, including HTML5, Android and iOS. We have some really exciting stuff coming up in this area. You can read my session description here. For those attending, I will be in the 11:15am slot on Friday.

As a plug for RIA Unleashed, I have attended and spoken here before and it is a really great conference. It is just the right size for really getting an opportunity to engage with your peers who are working on client or server side of Rich Internet Applications. If you are in the Boston area, I highly recommend it.

Model Driven Code Generation post from Matt Butler

2010-07-29T16:00:00.000-04:00

Matt Butler has posted some good model driven code generation information on his brand new blog. See the post here. LCDS 3.1 has the ability to generate JPA annotated JavaBeans as well, and if I don't find the time to post about it, perhaps he will!

ColdFusion Survey

2010-06-18T09:52:00.003-04:00

The ColdFusion team is looking for feedback on ColdFusion 9 and your wish list for the next major release. They have put a survey up at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ColdFusionServer.

Now is your chance to influence what goes in to the next version!

Blog spam and MAX 2010

2010-06-16T09:24:00.004-04:00

I am getting tired of deleting spam comments on the previous blog entry, so I thought I would add a new one just for variety. I wonder why the particular spammer is able to get around the Google captcha that is required to post, but every week or two they post to the last entry in my blog.

In other news, It has been confirmed that I will be speaking at MAX 2010. The tentative plan is for me to run a BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) session on the new Offline features in LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 for Flex and AIR. I have never done a BYOL, just a hands-on lab session, so this is going to be a "learning experience". This is a really a neat and powerful feature, so I hope folks will come away with a good idea of how they can use this feature in AIR apps that can go offline.

See you there!

Duplicate session errors

2010-03-01T13:12:00.003-05:00

Alex Glosband, one of our lead QA engineers on the LiveCycle Data Services team, has posted a very helpful and informative description on why certain Flex applications might get the error:

Detected duplicate HTTP-based FlexSessions, generally due to the remote host disabling session cookies. Session cookies must be enabled to manage the client connection correctly.

Check out the full discussion on his blog: http://www.alexglosband.com/?p=3

Photoshop 20th Anniversary Film "Startup Memories"

2010-02-18T18:30:00.002-05:00

This is worth the 18 minutes to watch:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/photoshop-20th-anniversary/startup-memories/

In this 18-minute documentary, produced by the Adobe TV and Adobe Content Strategy & Service teams, John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances that came together at just the right time spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.

One thing that stood out for me was near the end when one of the creators talked about hearing from people who said "Because of PhotoShop, I have a career". This is one of the most important reasons why I spent over 10 years of my profession life working on ColdFusion - the fact that what I helped create had thousands of users who made their living using it. That what I did for my job made a major impact on others. There really isn't anything more that a software developer can ask for. At least this software developer.

LCDS 3.0 has hit the streets

2009-11-20T15:58:00.002-05:00

LiveCycle Data Services ES2 version 3 is now available.

Download the free developer edition.

LiveCycle Data Services documentation is available online:

* Using LiveCycle Data Services HTML | PDF
* Application Modeling Technology Reference HTML | PDF
* ActionScript Language Reference HTML
* Installing LiveCycle Data Services HTML
* Javadoc HTML
* Release Notes HTML
* Quick Starts HTML

Model Driven Delopment

2009-10-29T17:42:00.003-04:00

Wow, its been three months since my last posting. I wish I could say that I have been using twitter to express all my thoughts to the web, but I don't use twitter so that wont work. :-)

Anyway, we are on the cusp of releasing LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3.0 which has some really exciting improvements in how you can create Flex applications that use the LCDS Data Management functionality. I could wax poetic for a few hundred words, or you could watch Christophe Coenraets excellant MAX 2009 session on model driven development. He really shows off why this is such a giant leap forward in productivity and usability.

Dean Harmon and I did a very successful (I think, and the evaluations seem to agree) hands-on session about this same topic, but the hands-on sessions were not recorded.

You can get the "almost final" LCDS 3.0 bits on Adobe Labs right now and give this stuff a try.

LiveCycle Data Services 3.0 Beta videos

2009-07-21T14:01:00.003-04:00

We have just published a set of videos (9 so far) that show off some of the new features in the LCDS 3 beta that has been available up on Adobe Labs for the past few weeks.

Of particular note is one that I recorded on how you can extend the new Fiber Assembler to customize the server side management of your data.

Check all the videos out here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/

LiveCycle Data Service 3.0 Beta available

2009-06-19T09:49:00.003-04:00

We launched LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 public beta yesterday on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/.

We have beefed up tooling and simplified developing flex application development. You can now develop new fully functional flex applications with no server code in under 10 minutes. We have a few videos to help people get started http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/, and plan to add more (I am on the hook for one or two).

Now is the chance for folks to try out the new Data Model development features we have added and give us some feedback.

ColdFusion 8 Performance Tuning

2009-06-10T15:15:00.002-04:00

Check out this new Dev Center article written by Kunal Saini - Performance tuning for ColdFusion applications. Lots of good information on VM tuning, Administrator settings and CFML code writing.

Brendan Meutzner on LCDS and CF

2009-05-12T10:10:00.002-04:00

I recently had an email exchange with Brendan Meutzner about a problem he was trying to solve when using an integrated ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services system. He wanted some way to use dynamic data sources in his LCDS assembler CFC. He blogged about his problem and the solution here.

Make ColdFusion 8 work with Apache CXF

2009-04-23T11:53:00.003-04:00

"Alan" left a comment on one of my older posts ("ColdFusion 8 Getting Started code available") detailing how to get ColdFusion 8 to work with Apache CXF. I figured it would be useful to repost in its own entry.

DISCLAIMER: I have not tried this, nor do I make any guarantees that this wont do bad stuff to your server. Try it on a Developer Edition on your desk before messing with any production server.

If anyone is interested, I have been able to make ColdFusion 8 work with Apache CXF, which supports a variety of web service standards and libraries - SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, REST, etc.

Caveats: CF8 works with CXF in the sense that CXF objects can be instantiated as Java objects in CFML and their operations successfully invoked. It does NOT work as a native CF web service call using or CreateObject("webservice", "..."). Also, this technique requires some low-level changes to the default CF8 installation, so it is not for the faint of heart.

In general, the procedure is to grab the CXF libraries and get CF to recognize them. You can drop them directly into a /lib folder that's in the CF classpath, or if you want to be a bit more cautious you can point the CF classpath to the folder that contains the CXF JAR files.

Detailed steps:

Download the latest CXF distribution and extract/install it somewhere. If your CXF root is /foo, then find /foo/lib. You'll see a bunch of JAR files, and your mission is to get CF to recognize these files and load the classes in them.

Stop the CF server.

CF8 and the JRE that comes with it use an older, incompatible version of the JAXB library, so we need to get the newer one in place. Create /foo/lib/endorsed and copy the jaxb-api-version.jar file into that folder.

Find jvm.config in your CF installation and open it in a text editor. Append the following to the JVM arguments: -Djava.endorsed.dirs=path_to_foo/lib/endorsed -Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs=javax.net.ssl. Find the string -Dcoldfusion.classPath= in the JVM arguments and place the path to /foo/lib immediately after the equals sign (i.e., at the FRONT of the classpath), with a comma to separate it from the rest of the classpath entries. Do not set the classpath using the CF administrator. It will not permit adding elements to the front of the classpath, and will in fact overwrite the classpath if it is used to change Java settings at any future point.

A suspected bug in the CF classloader causes the wrong part of the CF architecture to load the SAAJ classes. [Tom Here: This isn't a bug, CF maintains absolute control over which classes it loads via its own classloader. A better workaround would be to edit the jrun.properties file in the WEB-INF/lib/cfmx_bootstrap.jar file and change the exceptions list] Get around this by copying /foo/lib/saaj-api-version.jar into {java.home}/lib of your CF installation. Then delete or rename saaj-api-version.jar in /foo/lib so it does not get loaded from that location. Also delete or rename saaj.jar from the main CF library location (ColdFusion8\lib on a Windows installation, standalone configuration).

Disable the native JAXB library in ColdFusion by deleting or renaming jaxb-impl.jar in the main CF library location.

Restart the CF server.

With these steps, you will be able to invoke Java objects that serve as clients for the web service endpoints. These Java objects need to be created, compiled, and installed to a location in the CF classpath in order to be invoked. The CXF documentation describes ways to create the Java objects; wsdl2java might be your best bet. You can have it create classes that are SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 compatible, allowing you to call those services via the Java objects from inside ColdFusion files.

After doing this, I did a cursory test of the native CF web service functionality (Axis 1.1) and it seems to work still, so existing code shouldn't be affected.

There ya go, I would be interested in posting an update if Alan or someone else figures out what the classloading issues with the SAAJ libraries are.
Thanks Alan!