BarneyBlog

I just discovered that CF8 ships with a more complete Batik than CF7 did. Out of the box it's capable of transcoding SVG graphics to PNGs, which CF7's implementation wasn't capable of doing. With CF7 you had to move the partial Batik that came bundled and replace it with a full version to get transcoding to work, but no more. I'm not sure what CF8 uses it for, but CF7 appeared to use it for CFFORM stuff. Perhaps that's been extended and requires a full Batik, or maybe something else does. My initial thought was maybe the new Image libraries supported SVG, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

"Why SVG?", you ask? Because CFCHART is remarkably inflexible (and rather clumsy to boot) to the point that I wrote my own charting engine. It's hardly a CFCHART replacement, but far better suited to some of the charts that I need to produce. I chose SVG (several years ago, mind you) because it was widely supported and it's all text based, which makes generating it with CF a breeze. It also works as-is, or can be transcoded to a "normal" graphic (though you lose the vector base if you go to a raster format) for easier consumption.

Edit: Rob asked about the charts in the comments, so here's an example chart: capacity.png.  It doesn't really represent the full capabilities (area plots, multiple y-axes, etc.), but you get the idea.  The x-axis is labeled with age in days, with zero being midnight this morning.  If you've ever seen/used RRDTool (often paired with MRTG) the idea is similar, except that my database isn't round robin, it's historical, so I can change the time period on my dashboards and get charts back as far as I have data, if I want them.  Here's the same chart with data back to the beginning: capacity2.png.  As you can see, tracking of the 'imageCapacity' series started later (by about six months) than tracking 'totalImageCount'.  And no, those execution times (in the lower right) aren't representative - I grabbed these after a fresh restart so caches were empty.