We are interested in hearing from any Senior ColdFusion developers who are looking for a flexible freelance programming contract. Key skills should include:
Please send all CV's to: enquiries@magnoliabox.com
After a brilliant couple of days in Edinburgh for the Scotch on the Rocks conference, we are back in the office with fresh inspiration and ideas. We saw some excellent presentations, most memorable to me were Peter Bell's pragmatic angle on requirements and estimation, and the Open Bluedragon keynote (and lengthy discussion!); Exciting stuff that I'm looking forward to playing with.
We carry out a lot of image processing to achieve our photos to art solution and our frame and canvas preview feature. Most of this code was written before Coldfusion 8, which introduced lots of new image processing features native to the language. As a result, we have written Java code, some in-line with our Coldfusion, some in external Java classes. When trialling our upgrade to Coldfusion 8, we were pleased to find that our existing Java image code worked just as it did previously on Coldfusion 7. However, a week ago, we discovered that that some users were receiving timeout errors when uploading JPEGs to our photos to art solution. It turned out that the error only occurred with certain types of JPEGs, those which Java's BufferedImage class considers to have a custom colour model. We have code which converts these to workable RGB images, but it was this code which was failing on Coldfusion 8. I put the code in its simplest form, into Java...
BufferedImage bi_out = new BufferedImage(bi_in.getWidth(),
bi_in.getHeight(), BufferedImage.TYPE_3BYTE_BGR);
Graphics2D g = bi_out.createGraphics();
g.drawImage(bi_in, 0, 0, null);
g.dispose();
...and ran some tests outside of Coldfusion, through both the JRE 1.6.0, and the one in my standard Coldfusion 8 install. Both JREs worked without problems, which meant the problem must lie with Coldfusion, which led me to this solution.
So if you are having problems using Java to convert a BufferedImage of TYPE_CUSTOM in Coldfusion 8, you could try one of the two fixes below, as outlined here:
Our server is a much busier machine than it was 12 months ago. The increased traffic put a noticeable strain on Coldfusion 7, and as a result we had a few stability issues. Over time, Coldfusion gradually ate away at the server's memory until eventually it crashed, requiring a quick restart. We tried many different tweaks and managed to improve things slightly, but we were always fighting the problem. Three weeks ago we carried out the much-anticipated upgrade to Coldfusion 8. The first thing we observed was how the pages load consistently faster than they used to, we don't have any metrics but the difference is noticeable. Magnolia Soft uses the Mach-II framework and an object-oriented architecture which means that Coldfusion 8's increased performance for object creation has made a significant impact on response times. However, the most impressive improvement to note is its improved stability; since upgrading, we haven't restarted the server once. The server has been running like a dream, like a real server!
