Tuesday, March 30th the Triangle Area ColdFusion User Group will be hosting a special ColdFusion Builder event with Adobe.

Josh Adams from Adobe will be here to show us ColdFusion Builder, the long awaited ColdFusion IDE from Adobe. Josh will be digging deep under the hood to show us all the cool new features like ORM integration, extensions and more!

For more information and to RSVP please visit the TACFUG site.

This being an Adobe event I’m sure there will be some cool stuff you won’t want to miss!

Josh Demonstrates Latest ColdFusion Builder

I’ve finally posted my instructions for getting ColdFusion 9 up and running on VirtualBox!  It took me a few times to work through the process and get everything working (and documented) and at one point I forgot the password on the VM image and had to start over again.  Oooops.

Documentation is now on my wiki:  VirtualBox and ColdFusion 9

What will you end up with? A ‘virtual’ server running Apache/ColdFusion 9/MySQL.  Using VirtualBox’s shared directories you can access your code on the guest system.  This seemed to be the most simple and flexible way to configure things.   In my example I’m sharing the CFEclipse workspace directory but if you are using something different it should be easy to adjust to your configuration.

You could certainly run a GUI version of Ubuntu and install an IDE so you would have a self-contained development environment but with this example I wanted to create a system I could use at work and at home for various projects but not necessarily share the code and settings between them.

If you try this and run into any issues with the documentation – please contact me with corrections!

In the past I’ve bashed on Adobe about costly software, broken extensions and lack of Linux support but today I have something nice to say!

Recently on the CFEclipse mailing list we were discussing the ColdFusion 9 dictionary file and someone mentioned it would be nice if we could simply use the one from ColdFusion Builder. I shot off an email to Adam Lehman from Adobe and honestly expected either a) no reply or b) a firm ‘No’.

But instead Adam did reply and indicated he’d “look into it”.

So I waited a few weeks knowing Adam is a busy person and emailed him again. And again he replied! He said it seemed like sharing the dictionary file was possible but he still had to ‘run it by legal’.

OK. Now we’re doomed I thought.

So I waited another week or so and bugged him again. And low and behold this comes across Twitter:

@thecrumb btw. I got Adobe VP approval to share the #ColdFusion Builder dictionary w/ CFEclipse!

So I’d just like to publicly thank Adam for following through on my inquiry, and thanks to Adobe for sharing their toys with the other kids!

Now about that Linux version of ColdFusion Builder…

I’ve been working on setting up a VM running a LAMP stack along with ColdFusion 9  (which I’ll blog about soon).  I’ve got everything up and running and was tinkering around making some updates to our TACFUG site but was running into this weird issue that my CSS would not update – I would make a change and it wouldn’t show up in the browser.

I disabled all my browser cache and tried it in Chrome – same issue. I tried adding a UUID to the CSS call to force the browser to reload.

Then I thought it might be a ColdFusion issue so I spent some time in the Administrator turning all the options on/off (lots of new stuff in CF9!).  That didn’t work either.

Finally I pinged Twitter and John Mason helped me figure out that it was actually an Apache issue. His first thought was it was some caching module but looking in mods-enabled I didn’t see anything cache related. We were both searching on Google and found a few posts where people had similar issues and mentioned adding a line to their config file:

Enable Sendfile Off

I have no idea what this does – but I opened up my apache2.conf file, scrolled to the bottom and added it.  Restarted Apache and my CSS was now refreshing!

The Apache docs mention that in some circumstances you may need to disable this:

This directive controls whether httpd may use the sendfile support from the kernel to transmit file contents to the client. By default, when the handling of a request requires no access to the data within a file — for example, when delivering a static file — Apache uses sendfile to deliver the file contents without ever reading the file if the OS supports it.This sendfile mechanism avoids separate read and send operations, and buffer allocations. But on some platforms or within some filesystems, it is better to disable this feature to avoid operational problems:

• Some platforms may have broken sendfile support that the build system did not detect, especially if the binaries were built on another box and moved to such a machine with broken sendfile support.
• On Linux the use of sendfile triggers TCP-checksum offloading bugs on certain networking cards when using IPv6.
• On Linux on Itanium, sendfile may be unable to handle files over 2GB in size.
• With a network-mounted DocumentRoot (e.g., NFS or SMB), the kernel may be unable to serve the network file through its own cache.

For server configurations that are vulnerable to these problems, you should disable this feature.

So hopefully this will prevent someone from going through the same headaches I did.  Now I have to get busy now that everything is working!

Today I’ve been thinking how great open source is…

• All the recent Railo and OpenBD news – big things for CFML!
• E Text Editor goes ‘open company‘ (now maybe we’ll see a Linux version!)
• And my daily work with JIRA is enhanced because I know I can peek under the hood at any time…

And then I get an email on the CFEclipse mailing list about the ColdFusion extensions from Adobe being broken.

Usually when people post off-topic items on the CFEclipse mailing list I try to help out as much as possible.  But in this case I really can’t do squat and it’s frustrating.  I’ve blogged about the ColdFusion extension issue before:  Dear Adobe, The Eclipse Extension Is Broken…

But…

• The extension source is closed so no one outside of Adobe can do anything to help fix it
• Adobe has no public bug tracker for their tools (except Flex) so I don’t know where to ‘officially’ go to report an issue

So I’m left to whine on my blog and hope someone from Adobe stops by…  Ben Forta actually responded to the thread above but his anwser was a bit vague.  It sounds like this CF Extension functionality will be rolled into Bolt but will there still be a free version available for Eclipse afterwards???

I have been working on some really old code lately and to say it is a mess would be an understatement. Evaluate statements all over, font tags and queries with no queryparams.

I’ve been using the first version of QueryParam Scanner for awhile now and discovered that it’s been recently updated – nice new interface:

QueryParam Scanner

Also a nice new options screen:

QueryParam Scanner Options

And I also noticed a blurb about an Eclipse plugin.  Installation instructions are on the link above via the traditional Update Site method or you can download the .jar file directly.

When I first installed it I was a bit confused on how to run it from within Eclipse but after a bit of digging I found it!  Simply right click on your directory and there will be a new option “Scan With QueryParam Scanner”

QueryParam Scanner Eclipse Plugin

This will then open up your browser, start QueryParam Scanner and load the selected directory.   Very slick!  Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to pass in options (recurse directory) so it will only zip through the files in the root of the directory you select.  The author Peter Boughton does mention these are early releases. Hopefully he can tweak this a bit in future versions to give you more control.

In my opinion every project should be run through QueryParam Scanner and the VarScoper, just in case. :)

Update:
Peter left a comment and after checking there is indeed a QueryParam Scanner option under the Preferences menu (which I somehow completely missed!)

QueryParam Plugin Preferences

There has a been a good discussion on Gary Gilbert’s blog about the CFDude shirt that was given out at MAX.   I hate seeing stuff like this:

1. Because I wasn’t at MAX so no cool shirt for me :(
2. Adobe doesn’t provide stuff like this to the unwashed masses…

I then went digging around the Adobe site wondering if they did have a ’store’ online.  I never found it on the Adobe site itself but a quick Google pointed me towards Adobe Branded Merchandise.

Unfortunately that is all it is… Adobe stuff.  No ColdFusion shirts.  No Flex hats. No Forta posters for the bedroom.  No cool AIR stickers for my laptop.

Dear Adobe marketing.  Geeks like t-shirts.

Give a geek a shirt (or allow me to purchase one) and it’s FREE ADVERTISING for the life of the shirt!

I still have an Allaire ColdFusion shirt (and it still fits!).  I have a Macromedia ColdFusion bumper sticker.  I have a CF hat I wear everywhere (getting a bit thin on top).   Why can’t I get stuff like that directly from Adobe?  I could easily scan stuff and print them at CafePress but somehow that feels wrong and I doubt the lawyers at Adobe would approve.

While I know times are tough it can’t cost that much to print up some things and stick them online.  There is still time before the release of ColdFusion 9.  A Bolt t-shirt would be awesome!  :)

Last night I was thinking about the Bolt announcement and how disappointed I was in the whole thing. For the most part they announced they were building CFEclipse. Yes they announced some ORM and code generation tools but the majority of ‘features’ they announced are available today in CFEclipse.

Maybe I’m spoiled by using open-source and Google “beta” software for so long but I was really expecting something to download and tinker with from Adobe, even if it was alpha quality. They have had years to build this (IMO it should have been in the oven before Flex Builder) and I know they are probably baking in some fancy stuff for CF9 but it still seems like they could release something and work on the advanced features as they go along.

I think my expectations with new software (which leans strongly towards open source) lately is to see something with basic functionality and know it’s going to be improved in the future with frequent updates. When I first installed Ubuntu over two years ago it was functional but hardly bug free. 2 years later it has become very polished but still has the occasional bug and that’s OK. I know it’s very likely that those will be fixed in the next round of updates and features will be added and improved upon.

Maybe my wife is right and I’m just impatient… I’m still looking forward to getting beta access to Bolt and I hope the product is going to be worth the wait!