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Topic: Re: Combining PDF and FDF data
Conf: (P-PDF) Forms & FDF, Msg: 76601
From: aandi
Date: 11/17/2002 07:40 AM

[ Today's unhelpful nag: I still feel obliged to point out that the product is not and never has been called "Acrobat Writer". This may not matter a bit to you, but it can really confuse people who then go out and try to buy it. The product is just Acrobat, or Adobe Acrobat. Yes, it's a stupid name. ] Another issue with taking software that is written for an end-user and using it on a server is that it is likely to take it into its head to pop up messages, prompts, and errors now and again. That is why I'd always recommend using software designed for server use, and would fault anything like this in the now impossible event I was asked to audit it. I have seen mission critical processes run on a computer in the background where every so often someone has to go and click OK or else the newspaper (or whatever) doesn't come out. Scary. Microsoft express similar concerns on http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q257757 for their products. And, specific to Acrobat, it is not multi-threaded. You need to make sure you can't end up trying to talk to it from multiple simultaneous threads or processes. This can be pretty difficult with web applications. Multi-threading issues will hit, if you let them happen, in very weird and unpredictable ways. No, I have nothing to sell you, I just feel server processes need to be engineered from an entirely different point of view.