Forem: James Moberg

Moving to MyCFML.com

James Moberg — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 02:50:47 +0000

Blogging on the dev.to platform was a nice change from Tumblr. I really liked that I could embed my Github and gists to display and share code... but I wanted to do more (ie, interactive examples, command line/custom JAR demos, etc).

I recently saw one of my blog posts get some attention on LinkedIn and received an email. The image associated with my article was displayed as the DEV logo with text indicating "image no longer exists". This broken image can't be a good sign. I checked, and other articles as recent as 7 months old that I shared on LinkedIn also display the branded-DevTo fallback image. #smh

I also want better tools. I've been a ColdFusion developer for almost 30 years, and I should have stopped depending on external third parties to host my content a long time ago. Over time, I've witnessed many other ColdFusion-hosted websites migrate to WordPress or some other static "serverless" platform. As a result, I've decided to do the reverse and focus solely on building my content, more reputation and my code and do it my way... on MyCFML.

Yup, MyCFML is a 100% CFML-powered website. I considered adding one of the old-school early 90's website badges, but I didn't want to avoid increasing the target vector potential from wanna-be hackers and script-kiddies. Join me over there. I'm still working on adding the ability to comment. I wrote a commenting module many years ago and would rather spend time modernizing it than using a third-party.

Want to contact me? I'm active on X/Twitter (gamesover), LinkedIn and through my company website, SunStar Media. I'm also a member on various CF-related Slack & Facebook groups, but don't really participate in those forums much. Later!

Using ColdFusion and Xpdf to extract PDF metadata

James Moberg — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 22:55:41 +0000

This article "Using ColdFusion and Xpdf to extract PDF metadata" has been moved to myCFML.

Xpdf is an open source projects that includes a PDF viewer, but it also includes a collection of command line tools for Linux, Windows and Mac that can perform some helpful functions:

xpdf: PDF viewer (click for a screenshot)
pdftotext: converts PDF to text
pdftops: converts PDF to PostScript
pdftoppm: converts PDF pages to netpbm (PPM/PGM/PBM) image files
pdftopng: converts PDF pages to PNG image files
pdftohtml: converts PDF to HTML
pdfinfo: extracts PDF metadata
pdfimages: extracts raw images from PDF files
pdffonts: lists fonts used in PDF files
pdfdetach: extracts attached files from PDF files

Can ColdFusion already do some of this? Of course it can, but I am always exploring alternative options and have to occasionally perform some process intensive operations outside the context of potential CF timeouts, threads and java heap limitations. I've encountered some issues in the past where ColdFusion will evaluate isPDFFile as TRUE when reading a non-Acrobat-or-CF-generated PDF, but then decide that it's not really a PDF file and throw a CF error when using CFPDF to read the same PDF (using action="getInfo").

When it comes to metadata, I haven't entirely decided if I'm a purist regarding returned values. For example, CFPDF returns "created" and "modified" as a string formatted like "D:20250324103702-07'00'". It's probably consistent with how the metadata is stored in the PDF file, but fails IMHO as it's not a valid date format and requires additional parsing in order to be useful. (It does appear to retain timezone info. That's nice, I guess.) CFPDF also returns a boolean rotation flags and page sizes for every page as separate arrays. If you attempt to pass pages="1" in hopes of minimizing the response, a hard error is thrown as this argument is not allowed. It appears that metadata for every page is the one and only option.

Recently when using CFPDF to personalize an existing single-page cover PDF by adding a watermark, I needed to know both the dimensions & rotation of the preexisting PDF so I could generate a PDF (using WKHTMLTOPDF) with the correct watermark placement. I decided to use Xpdf's pdfinfo.exe to extract this information primarily so that the output would be consistent regardless of which version of CFML platform is used. It's definitely possible that the future CFPDF action="getinfo" option may be updated to return different data in the name of progress/modernity. I also wanted dates to be dates, numeric values to be numeric, boolean to be boolean and for "rotation" to be calculated and the width/height to be converted to inches. (The "points" unit is nice, but I prefer to use "in" with WKHTMLTOPDF for CSS absolute positioning of elements and defining the width/height output of the PDF.)

Go Deeper

To view the metadata and access CFML source code, check out this post on MyCFML.

https://www.mycfml.com/articles/using-coldfusion-and-xpdf-to-extract-pdf-metadata/

Support Unlimited Forwarded Email Messages via API (and ColdFusion)

James Moberg — Fri, 09 May 2025 01:35:26 +0000

This article Support Unlimited Forwarded Email Messages via API (and ColdFusion) - Forward Email Webhook and Taffy API has been moved to myCFML.

Source Code

To access to the source code for the Taffy API endpoint, check out the post on the new MyCFML website.

CF_Timer Revisited

James Moberg — Thu, 01 May 2025 19:21:42 +0000

I posted an update to my ColdFusion CF_Timer custom tag on my new myCFML blog with the same title. It has an allowedIPs option so that it can be safely integrated without displayed data to users that don't need to see it.

After I posted the initial CFTag back in 2022, a fix was requested on Adobe's tracker, CF-4214324 to "to decouple cftimer from admin debug output feature", but nothing has changed.

Check out the article on myCFML:

https://www.mycfml.com/articles/cf-timer-revisited/

Ben & Ryan Show Guest Appearance & myCFML

James Moberg — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 22:04:12 +0000

This article "Ben & Ryan Show Guest Appearance - ColdFusion Custom UDFs" has been moved to myCFML.

I was recently invited to be a guest on the "Ben & Ryan Show" podcast to share some custom ColdFusion UDFs. The episode just aired on Tuesday, 2025-04-22. This served as motivation to launch a new CFML resource that I'd been discussing internally for the past couple of years with my business partner... introducing myCFML.com.

I'll still keep blogging on DEV.to, tweeting on X and cross-posting on LinkedIn, but I wanted to create a new home dedicated to CFML where I could continue to blog, post code examples that could be tested and have additional resources dedicated to:

Recommended web application developer utilities & services
Third-party command-line software (to extend CFML)
Third-party java libraries
Stats comparing versions and CFML vs non-CFML approaches
References to lost CFML resources (only available via archive.org)

I haven't built in subscriptions or commenting modules as I will be adding expanded account features & functionality that go further than regular blogs.

PDF Generation, Bloat and Optimization

James Moberg — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:05:43 +0000

The State of myCFML PDF Generation

My current comparison is with CFDocument on the deprecated CF2016 Developer Edition. I'm planning on performing tests with CF2021 & CF2023 soon and will perform this on my personal developer workstation using CommandBox and a testing framework that I'm in the process of developing. I have not personally downloaded or used CF2025 yet¹. I believe that it may be using the same iText library as CF10. (Can anyone confirm this?) I also haven't compared with Lucee 5.3+ Flying Saucer implementation.

This will be a part of a series as I intend on performing a lot more tests as well as sharing tips that we've learned on how to improve overall PDF quality, performance and file size.

Technologies

CFDocument Built-in Adobe ColdFusion function that creates PDF output from a text block containing CFML and HTML. (NOTE: Some ACF overhead may occur due to adding the "Adobe ColdFusion Developer/Trial Edition - Not for Production Use" watermark.)
CFHTMLtoPDF Built-in Adobe ColdFusion function that creates PDFs from HTML using a WebKit based rendering engine. Some ACF overhead may occur due to adding the "Adobe ColdFusion Developer/Trial Edition - Not for Production Use" watermark. I tried testing this on a CF2016 Standard production server, but got the error message "No Service manager is available.". (We don't use CFHTMLTOPDF, so it may be disabled at the CFAdmin level.)
WKHTMLTOPDF (LGPLv3; portable) tends to be faster and generate smaller PDFs. It can also run concurrently and generate PDFs in the background without using a ColdFusion thread or impacting the Java heap memory. Download
Ghostscript (GNU GPL Affero license; portable) is an interpreter for the PostScript(R) language and PDF files. It runs on various embedded operating systems and platforms including Windows, macOS, the wide variety of Unix and Unix-like platforms, and VMS systems. Download

Test an empty page with only a "Hello World" H1 header

There's a huge differences in the generation file size and the Ghostscript optimization doesn't make much of a difference.

Server	Engine	Generation	FileSize	Ghostscript Duration	Ghostscript Filesize	Percent Smaller
CF2016	CFDocument	486 ms	40,837	10 ms	40,068	1.89%
CF2016	CFHTMLTOPDF	1286 ms	77,179	9 ms	98,953	-28.20%
CF2016	WKHTMLTOPDF	223 ms	7,539	9 ms	5,167	31.47%

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"><head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
</body>
</html>

Tests with a locally-downloaded 4.7mb NASA JPG image rendered at 400px wide.

The difference regarding file size is a much wider gap here for CFDocument. Using Ghostscript to optimize results in a much smaller CFDocument.

Server	Engine	Generation	FileSize	Ghostscript Duration	Ghostscript Filesize	Percent Smaller
CF2016	CFDocument	8,046 ms	24,311,787	50 ms	74,478	99.693%
CF2016	CFHTMLTOPDF	2,256 ms	120,258	1017 ms	136,211	-11.71%
CF2016	WKHTMLTOPDF	1,638 ms	492,115	45 ms	21,012	95.73%

I also ran this test script on a production server for CFDocument to eliminate the watermark and the filesize was consistent 24mb, but the Ghostscript result was 47,028 (36.86% smaller if no watermark exists) and still twice as large as WKHTMLTOPDF.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"><head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
    <img src="/tempdirectory/images_yyyymmddHHnnss.jpg" width="400" height="248" border="1">
</body>
</html>

¹ I haven't personally interacted with CF2025 beyond accessing it online via CFFiddle. I haven't had any time to read the terms and do not wish to be legally bound by any rules that I may not be fully understand. Back to text

Source Code

https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/b957c34cddea38f4bd2d777b41e348ac

CFFrankenstein: Choosing to use EXEs instead of CFML BIFs

James Moberg — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 16:29:13 +0000

This article "CFFrankenstein: Choosing to use EXEs instead of CFML BIFs" has been moved to myCFML.

I choose to use a lot of third-party Windows command line programs as part of our ColdFusion/CFML stack. Much of the functionality could be considered duplicated since official built-in functions (BIFs) already exist, but I perceive it as a "customer-controlled functions that always return reliable results regardless of CFML platform and/or version". (I've shared most of these programs back in 2020 article entitled Supporting ColdFusion with Command Line Programs.)

In the upcoming months, I'll be modernizing and expanding the functionality of my existing CFCs & UDFs that leverage these executables and share them with the ColdFusion/CFML community at-large. (I recently shared a getQRSVG UDF using Zint.) Comment and let me know which you'd like to see first.

Some examples:

7-Zip: We started using this before CF8 added ZIP functionality. This is still faster, supports more options and can operate in the background without a CFThread.
Bulk Rename Command: This approach was soo much faster when it came to bulk renaming files. Without this, we'd have to recursively use CFDirectory, loop and use CFile to rename files and pray that it doesn't time-out.
CURL: We've had to use this for MLS RETS access because CFHTTP basic authentication wouldn't reauthenticate as needed. We also use it to fetch large files in the background, since the file doesn't have to be fully loaded into the Java Heap memory when downloaded. (I also found a way to stream a remote file to be saved locally without having to load it into memory.) We've been using a Taffy API endpoint that leverages CURL to perform 3rdparty DNS look-ups to bind the request to an external WAF IP when validating SSL certificates. (Why should I pay for a service that I can easily build myself... I'm a developer, right?)
FastCopy: This program is no longer has a free license, but we've been using the previously open-sourced version to sync files from a mail server's inbox folder via a UNC path. This approach was significantly faster than using similar CFML logic.
GhostScript: We use this only because we still use CFDocument and this EXE enables us to reduce the bloated filesize of the generated PDFs.
GraphicsMagic: We looked for an alternative because CFImage wasn't able to read some iPhone 4 JPGs. We read an Etsy blog article entitled Batch Processing Millions and Millions of Images and determined that we needed that same level of performance. After integration, my business partner thought it wasn't working because CFImage was previously adding 2-8 seconds to the processing request whereas GM was nearly instantaneous.
Kid3: This is an area that Adobe has no existing support even though Adobe has commercial products that work with audio & video. This EXE enables us to manipulate artist, title, album, track, copyright data and artwork to MP3s via the embedded ID3 metadata.
PDFtk/qPdf/xPdf: These are three different PDF-related libraries that provide somewhat similar functionality. We were kinda forced to use these because sometimes isPDFFile() will return true, but CFPDF will throw an error and claim that it's not a PDF. It's also convenient to have always have PDF-related functionality when spinning up a CFML server using CommandBox without having to manually install additional modules.
S3Express: For a digital on-demand web application, we were using built-in S3 services, but it was too slow (110 seconds). Even using the AmazonS3 CLI EXE was too slow (40 seconds). S3Express performed the same task in 16 seconds. After discovering this, how could we keep using the built-in features? (NOTE: I haven't retested this since C10. Has there been any improvements?)
West Wind DeleteFiles: We use CRON (not CFSchedule) to reliably perform tasks and one of those is to delete temp files. "DeleteFiles" enables us to blindly bulk delete any files older than x days. This approach operates entirely separate from our CFML servers, has zero impact on CFML performance and "just works".
WKHTMLTOPDF: This EXE offers more advanced HTML/CSS support than CFDocument, but may have issues if accessing 3rd-party web content. (In a single use case, I've had to use Puppeteer due to client-side javascript feature detection rendering issues.) This EXE is faster and provides smaller, consistent output since we started using it with CF9. It also enables us to generate PDFs when spinning up a CFML server using CommandBox without having to manually install any additional modules.
Zint: Need a barcode? This is the standard. I recently shared a UDF wrapper that leverages Zint to generate responsive QR code SVGs without creating physical files. The SVG text can then be embedded inline on webpages and PDFs (er, using WKHTMLTOPDF. I don't believe SVG images work with CFDocument.) I've used some java libraries that can generate QR codes, but they were limited in terms of options regarding color/size and output formats (ie, only JPG or PNG).

Comment and let me know which you'd like to see first.

Using ColdFusion to Generate Pre-Signed Wasabi Download URL

James Moberg — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:45:41 +0000

This article "Using ColdFusion to Generate Pre-Signed Wasabi Download URL" has been moved to myCFML.

There was an internal decision to use Wasabi Cloud Storage instead of Amazon S3 and I needed to use ColdFusion to generate a pre-signed URL to allow access to AI-generated content for a limited time. I had used the Sv4Util.cfc and aws-cfml libraries before with Amazon and thought it was just as simple, but I got confused somewhere along the way and it just wasn't working.

The Wasabi documention listed several approaches to generate a valid pre-signed URL...

Using the AWS CLI
Using the AWS Tools for Powershell
Using the S3 Browser
Using Wasabi Explorer
Using pre-signed S3 URLs for temporary, automated access in your application code
- Python and Boto3
- aws-sdk for Nodejs
- AWS SDK for PHP (V2)

... but none of these solutions were very helpful for my environment and I didn't want to have to fallback to using the command line.

I thought it'd be an easy function for AI to generate, but the results still weren't working.

After some additional searches on Google, I came across an Amazon API reference regarding Authenticating Requests: Using Query Parameters (AWS Signature Version 4) and it outlined a step-by-step approach with detail instructions, detailed descriptions and static example (with example output). Whenever I'm working with a third-party API, I always look for basic CURL examples so that I can see all the explicit settings and this example was perfect.

I was able to quickly debug & identify the issues that caused the calculation to be wrong. After finding out how to do it right, I took another look at the aws-cfml library and shared the cfml example with Wasabi (but I don't think they'll update their webpage to include links to AWS documentation or CFML examples.)

While I'm not currently using this generateS3PresignedUrl UDF in production, I thought I'd share it in case other developers can benefit from it.

Source Code

https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/bbdb652e4390898ea27eee489923ede3

Here's an example using the aws-cfml library.

https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/d2d38c5eaacba400decb21010124b159

ColdFusion getQRSVG() UDF - Returns responsive SVG source

James Moberg — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:07:44 +0000

In a project I'm working on, I needed to generate a QR code and display it within an HTML file that is converted to a PDF using WKHTMLTOPDF. I didn't want to rely upon physical, statically-hosted SVG image files and wished to embed it. With WKTHMLTOPDF, I could use javascript to generate the QR code, but that requires adding a time delay and I didn't want to negatively impact processing time (even though WKHTMLTOPDF is faster than CFDocument.)

I already have a ColdFusion wrapper for Zint Barcode Generator function, so I just needed to write a CFML wrapper to:

use generateZint() to create a temporary SVG file
read the temp file data
remove XML & HTML doctype headers
modify the SVG XML source to "make it responsive"
delete the temp file

Here it is. I hope that this helps some CFML developers.

UPDATE (8 Hours later)

I've updated the UDF so that it isn't dependent on the generateZint() UDF and so it outputs the SVG text directly to the console... thus skipping writing, reading & deleting. The process is now only:

use zint.exe to capture SVG output
remove XML & HTML doctype headers

I didn't notice much difference in terms of performance, but I consider it a win anytime I can reduce the amount of I/O calls to the file system.

Source Code

https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/fbbd2599102216448ada8e9f85d40b9c

Backporting New ColdFusion 2025 Function listGetDuplicates()

James Moberg — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 19:37:20 +0000

I saw a post on Linkedin regarding the "Unlocking the Power of listGetDuplicates". I like unlocking power, so I checked it out.

The new Adobe ColdFusion 2025 listgetduplicates function accepts 4 parameters: list, delimiter, ignoreCase & includeEmptyFields. A List string is required, and the default delimiter is a comma. I'm not sure what the other 2 parameters default to. The values must be boolean, so one could assume that it's false since they added language to describe what happens "if true". (Documentation should be explicit, and much of Adobe's documentation doesn't include the default values of function properties & arguments.)

None of our CFML projects have been migrated to ColdFusion 2025 yet. (This will require lots of testing as we use many third-party JAVA libraries). We've been using the "anti-duplicate" version of this function since 2008, listGetDistinctValues UDF from CFLib.org. This function doesn't support "case" or automatically trim values. (I've previously extended this function to accept & return arrays.)

I wondered how difficult it would be to port this new function to an old, deprecated version of ColdFusion... like 2016. Built-in functions like structnew("casesensitive") didn't exist, so that method can't be used. My workaround was to use java's hashCode() function to quickly calculate a unique-ish signed integer to aid in identify character case.

Additional support for the following has been added:

list: Accept a list or an array
trimValues: Boolean to ensure values are properly trimmed to avoid false duplicates. (default: true)
returnFirstMatch: Boolean to return the first match and retain original sort order (default: false)
returnDelimiter: Character(s) returned list elements (default: the original "delimiter")
returnAsArray: Return the list elements as an array (default: false)

Source Code

https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/103625ffdf9688b810485183db9b648f

isValidHexString ColdFusion UDF

James Moberg — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:06:13 +0000

While working on my ColdFusion colorTools CFC, I wondered if isValid() supported a "hex" type since "guid" & "UUID" both rely on validating hexadecimal numbers... and the answer is no.

NOTE: I've added some new features to colorTools, but will write about them next week after I add some demo & test scripts.

Validating hex strings isn't difficult, but some values may be prefixed with "#" or "0x". Hex is also used for many other things beyond color codes, but I wanted to optionally & explicitly test for 6 character string values when accepting hex color values. I believe that this UDF covers all the requirements. (If it doesn't, let me know.)

Source Code

https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/c4079d7c813b0ad3d1a28cfc7551c355

ColdFusion colorTools CFC (In Progress)

James Moberg — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 15:34:25 +0000

While working on some internal graphs to represent daily Fastly WAF/CDN statistics, I realized that I needed to generate some additional random colors. I started to use the returnRandomHEXColors UDF from CFLib. Out of the first 10 colors that were generated, the first 5 looked very similar and one of them was white and didn't contrast very well on a white background.

My initial thought was to create a single UDF, but it wasn't that simple as the function required additional support for max luminance & min contrast. I didn't want to have to remember to keep 3 UDFs together in order for them to retain functionality. I also was already performing HEX-to-RGB conversion when using HEX colors with the Chart.js javascript library, so it seemed natural to include these related functions to the CFC so I wouldn't have to "repeat myself".

makeWCAGChartColor

My approach, which could very well be overkill, was to:

compare against an array of existing colors (to prevent duplication)
identify last color used and ensure the new color meets a WCAG minimum contrast requirement (contrast min: 4.5)
calculate luminance to ensure the result is not too bright (luminance max: 0.7)
provide a fallback in case a color can't be determined after 100 attempts
return color value as uppercase HEX
- Better readability and scannability
- Wider adoption in professional style guides and tools
- Consistency with historical and team-based workflows
- It didn't need to look "modern", just be consistent

Here's what default usage source currently looks like:

colorTools = new colorTools();

for (i = 1; i lte 25; i += 1) {
    color = colorTools.makeWCAGChartColor();
    writeoutput('<div style="display:inline-block; width:100px; height:50px; background-color:##' & color & '; border:1px solid ##000; margin:5px; text-align:center; line-height:50px; font-family:Arial, sans-serif; font-size:14px; color:##fff; text-shadow:0 0 2px ##000;">' & color & '</div>');
}

... and here's the result:

I've added some other public helper functions too, like:

calculateContrast
calculateLuminance
hexToRGB
rgbToHex

I included the ColorBrewer palette and all named W3C X11 colors and these values can be retrieved via the getVariable() method:

colorTools.getVariable("colorBrewerPalette") // returns a struct of named palettes with array of colors
colorTools.getVariable("w3cx11") // returns a struct of named colors

More updates and functionality will follow soon. Now that I have my extra colors, I need to get back to integrating the interactive Chart.js graphs.

Feel free to contact me if there's a nagging color issue that has always bugged you or if you have any ideas for future features. (I'm going to personally review the projects that we've developed during the last 25 years to identify other color-related features that would be useful.)

Here's the Github repository (I'm not using a gist for this one.):

JamoCA / colorTools

CFML function for color generation and manipulation

colorTools

CFML function for color generation and manipulation

NOTE: This CFC is still in the early stages of development. More functions and better documentation will be coming in the future.

Usage

colorTools = new colorTools()

makeWCAGChartColor(makeUnique, usedHexColors, fallbackHexColor, minContrast, maxLuminance, returnAs)

Returns a random WCAG HEX color with minimum contrast and maximum luminance filters with option to make unique and ensure that next color isn't too similiar to previously generated color.

for (i = 1; i lte 25; i += 1) {
    color = colorTools.makeWCAGChartColor();
    writeoutput('<div style="display:inline-block; width:100px; height:50px; background-color:##' & color & '; border:1px solid ##000; margin:5px; text-align:center; line-height:50px; font-family:Arial, sans-serif; font-size:14px; color:##fff; text-shadow:0 0 2px ##000;">' & color & '</div>');
}

calculateContast(color1, color2)

Description & example coming soon.

calculateLuminance(r, g, b, color)

Description & example coming soon.

hexToRGB(hexColor, returnAs)

Description & example coming soon.

rgbToHex(r,

…

View on GitHub