Where do I even start...
Scenario: I am the senior architect of multiple corporate .Net solutions. Recently I decided to introduce ColdFusion11 to serve as a job server for background tasks (Scheduled ETL, Email Provider, Ad Hoc PDF generation and whatever other tasks we may wish to offload in a separate thread.) While I must admit, I stopped doing ColdFusion development some years ago; however, this does not negate the fact that I was an early adopter of ColdFusion and have well over 10 years of seasoned "in the trenches" experience with the language from the Alliare days, through the Macromedia days and into the Adobe days. Truth is - I have been a huge advocate of ColdFusion and implemented it many large corporations. Having said that -- I figured implementing a ColdFusion stack would be a cinch given my background. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I must say that some of the features I hoped to use (PDF & Web Services) are proving to be a big headache for me and I can't help but wonder if this is a wasted investment. I have to be honest - I am pretty disappointed in CF11.
Lets address the first issue. What is the problem with the cfdocument tag when writing PDF. I keep running into an issue where my CF pages timeout when writing PDF files. After doing some googling I find out this is an issue many are having and nobody really seems like they have a clue as to the root cause and Adobe is mute on the issue. Before you ask me to post my code - please understand I timeout with <cfdocument ....>Hello World</cfdocument>. This is not a problem with my code (works fine locally w/Dev Edition - production is where it falls on it's face) - all I have done are basic query outputs with a single record in a query object and no images, no styles --- just basic HTML and cfoutput stuff. Restarting the coldfusion service seems to be the only fix. This is unacceptable. I have since disabled the PDF Service Manager - it would not verify anyway (ColdFusion Service Features) -- perhaps this will prove to stabilize the issue. In any case - can someone on the Adobe CF Team explain to me why this problem is pervasive and what I can do to fix it, work around it and not just hope my job server doesn't have a random nervous breakdown.
Thank you for your time and effort