Rob Brooks-Bilson's Blog

Homesite + Updates for ColdFusion MX 7

2005-02-07T18:12:00-05:00

In case you haven't already discovered them yet, Macromedia has made available a HomeSite + CFMX 7 Updater. The updater contains tag definitions and help files for the new CFMX 7 release.

DRK 10 Now Available for DevNet Subscribers

2005-02-07T10:34:00-05:00

This one seems to have slipped under the radar, as I couldn't find any other blog references to it... Developer Resource Kit 10 (DRK 10) is now available (has been since 1/27/05). Macromedia recently announced that they are discontinuing DevNet subscriptions, and will no longer produce a DRK after DRK 13. Searching Macromedia's web site doesn't turn up much info on DRK 10. If you are a DevNet subscriber, and are interested in knowing what's in this release, here's the info. Note that Macromedia no longer sellse DRKs outside of the DevNet subscription. Flash

Component: Expanding Pod
Component: Localizer
Library: RSS Library

Dreamweaver Extensions:

WA Auto Spell Check
Music Player Flash Element
PHP 5 Edit Operation
MX Kollection
ActionScript Code Hints

ColdFusion MX

Sample Application: PL-ease - product life-cycle management tool built on Ray Camden's Lighthouse bug tracking tool from DRK 4

Macromedia Releases ColdFusion MX 7.0 - aka Blackstone

2005-02-06T23:32:00-05:00

It's official, Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7.0 has been officially released. I'll blog much more regarding the new featues/functionality when I get over the Philadelphis Eagles Superbowl loss, and get into the office tomorrow...

CFCZone on the Move

2005-01-29T00:39:00-05:00

www.CFCZone.org has moved to a new host. We're now running the site on an excellent server provided by CFXHosting. If you're still seeing the Mindtool banner at the bottom of the page, you probably need to flush your DNS cache. On a related note, the CFCDev mailing list is also migrating. As I type this, I'm still waiting for the MX records to update. I've already updated all 570+ regular subscribers, and I'm hoping for a relatively smooth transition of the list. There is one small problem, though. We have about 170 or so Digest subscribers on the old list. Unfortunately, our new (free) listserv software doesn't support digest subscriptions (I have no idea why). So, we've got to figure out what to do with these users. The choices appear to be to convert them to regular subscribers, unsubscribe them, or start asking for donations to purchase a better listserv app.

Free WiFi (Sort of)

2005-01-04T09:31:00-05:00

I spent the time between Christmas and New Years back in Delaware this year, visiting with friends and family. I was hoping to make it a computer free "vacation", but we had some pretty serious Sarbanes Oxley related activities going on at work, and there was a chance I would be needed to look into something related to our SDLC compliance as it relates to our issue tracking system. So, I brought along the laptop. I split my time staying at my mom and dad's places respectively, my mom having a dial-up connection, and my dad having DSL. Neither has WiFi, or even a router, and needless to say, I didn't bring one with me. Just out of curiosity, though, I decided to open up my laptop and see if I could find any open wireless networks. To my (not so big) surprise, I found several unencrypted networks at both houses, each broadcasting their SSIDs (default, linksys, and a few named ones). So, thanks to the kindness of my parents neighbors, I was able to use the Internet, for free, whenever I needed to. When I first installed a wireless network in my house in Arizona, I didn't encrypt it at first. I was just lazy, and it was a pain to enter the WEP key into all of my wireless devices, and give that out when friends visited, etc. Plus, at the time, I figured most of my neighbors weren't really smart enough to take advantage of my open network. And besides, it was the only wireless network I could sniff out in my entire neighborhood. That all changed one day, though, when I noticed two new open wireless networks pop up within range of my house. Once I saw that, I immediately encrypted my connection (I've always had my SSID broadcast turned off). Now from my house, I have the choice of using my own connection, or any one of three other open connections. I think it's great so many people are getting on the wireless bandwagon, but I think it also illustrates the point that security is a real problem as well.

iPod: U2 Edition

2004-12-23T08:38:00-05:00

My wife has been getting pretty jealous of my iPod lately (4th gen, 40GB ). That jealous look she's shot me more than once while we were traveling somewhere, me with my headphones on oblivious to the fact that she was bored out of her mind, convinced me to get her an iPod for Christmas. We're big U2 fans, so I decided to fork over the extra $50 and get her the iPod U2 edition. I love the black color, but wasn't too crazy about the red click wheel from the online photos I've seen. I ordered anyway. Needless to say, when she opened it last night (early present), she was thrilled. It's actually pretty sweet looking, red click wheel and all. For the extra $50, you get the iPod in black (something what would cost you close to that to get custom done. It's also laser engraved with the band's signatures. It also comes with a coupon for $50 off of the U2 virtual box set, available only on iTunes. We probably won't be picking that up, as we already own every U2 Album produced, including a bunch of imports. It's a shame that they aren't selling some of the unreleased songs seperately. I don't want to spend $100 for a couple of songs that weren't good enough to make it on a previous album!

Plum Public Beta Announced

2004-11-30T07:34:00-05:00

Adam and David Churvis over at Productivity Enhancements have released the public beta of Plum, a RAD tool for developing ColdFusion based applications. Plum stands for "Practical Lightweight Universal Methodology", and consists of an IDE, code generators, a stored procedure builder, unit test generators, an application framework, and a development methodology all rolled up into a neat package. A release date for Plum hasn't yet been announced. Perhaps the most shocking feature of Plum, though, is its price: It's free! Adam and David decided to release the tool for free. The IDE is ad supported via a small, non-intrusive (240x120) ad in the lower left-hand corner of the IDE. Of course if you find Plum useful, you can purchase a license key for $79.95 that will disable the advertisements entirely. They are also offering unlimited telephone support (to supplement the free online support) for $495 per developer.

ColdFusion 6.0 to 6.1 Upgrade Gotcha

2004-11-17T07:53:00-05:00

Recently, I upgraded the last of the CFMX 6.0 systems here at my company to CFMX 6.1. I ran into a small problem after the upgrade where the ODBC Server and ODBC Agent services, used by ColdFusion to allow connections to ODBC datasources would not start. I had run into this before, but I couldn't quite remember what the issue was (one more reason for documenting your installs and upgrades). To make a long story short, ColdFusion was installed on the D drive of this machine, which was the root of the problem. Apparently, when you install/upgrade CFMX on a drive other than C (Windows), the .ini files used by the two services in question get incorrect drive/directory references. The solution for the problem is to do a search and replace all instances of: C:\Program Files\Merant\ with D:\CFusionMX in the directory D:\CFusionMX\db\slserver52 and all of its subdirectories. This assumes your install is on the D drive. More information can be found in Macroemdia Technote 18800.

Recipe for Disaster

2004-11-15T08:02:00-05:00

Last week, I was updating our disaster recovery plan for our public website and ran into an interesting "problem" with recovering ColdFusion. As part of our planning, we regularly go off-site to our disaster recovery provider's facility and bring up various systems as if we had to recover from a real disaster. In my case, after the network and operating systems were in place, it was my job to bring our public website back up. This consisted mainly of installing anc configuring Apache and ColdFusion, then restoring the actual code from tape. The Apache install wen't smoothly. ColdFusion, however, threw me for a loop. We have media disks that are part of our disaster recovery packages, and mine had Apache, CF MX 6.1 and the new updater as well as a recent copy of our httpd.conf file, a CAR file containing the CF server config, and third party database drivers. When I went to actually install CF, the installer threw up an error saying that I needed MDAC 2.6 SP2 or later in order to complete the install. Apparently, a fully patched OS doesn't contain the latest MDAC. The simple solution would have been to just go out to Microsoft's Data Site and download the latest MDAC driver. Problem was, we had no Internet circuit. We had brought it down a few hours prior to simulate a loss of our eVPN with our main campus. There were no other Internet connections available to us at that point! In the end, we ended up running over to a coworker's appartment and downloading the driver to a USB flash drive. Once I had that, I had CF installed and configured in about 20 minutes, and the site restored from backup in about another 30 minutes. The moral of the story here is that if you are planning a disaster recovery plan for CF, you need to include the latest MDAC in your media, as it isn't included with the CF install!

Firefox 1.0 Goes Gold

2004-11-09T08:17:00-05:00

It's official, Firefox 1.0 is now available for download. If you haven't tried Firefox yet, you really should. It's tabbed browsing and RSS integration features alone make it worth the switch from IE. That, and it's just more secure. The site is pretty busy today, so there are several mirrors that you can try if you can't get if from mozilla.org: Win32 Mirror
Linux, Mac, Win32, and SRC mirror You should note that if you are using an older version of Firefox with extensions, chances are that many of those extensions won't work until they are upgraded for the 1.0 version.

More Thoughts on Design Patterns In ColdFusion

2004-11-08T11:07:00-05:00

I've been getting asked quite a bit lately about using Design Patterns in ColdFusion. It seems that a lot more people are reading up on them, but are often having a more difficult time figuring out both how and when to actually implement them within their ColdFusion applications. I think it's important for developers to approach the use of design patterns not from a "which patterns can I use in my application", or "I want to use the strategy pattern in an application" approach, but rather from a solid architectural approach. That is, I think it's more productive for developers to first model their application, then look for patterns that help solve problems within that model. Of course in order to do this, you first need a good understanding of what the most common design patterns are, and how they can be used in an application. One of the biggest pitfalls to avoid up front, though, is simply learning a pattern and then doing the equivalent of a copy/paste into your applications. Patterns are not absolute, and a pattern that fits well in one situation may not fit the same way into all of your applications. The only way to really understand design patterns, and how to apply them in your applications comes through study and experience. So, where does this leave us as ColdFusion developers? Most of the design pattern literature out there deals with implementing design patterns in languages such as C/C++, or Java, or sometimes even pseudo-code. That's ok if you understand those languages, especially if you are able to make the connection between how it's done in another language, and how that maps to ColdFusion and CFCs. If you read the ColdFusion Developers Journal, you may have noticed that design patterns are being discussed in more and more articles. What i would suggest doing if you are interested in incorporating design patterns into your ColdFusion development is to purchase one of the popular design pattern books, and use it as a guide when reading some of the various ColdFusion specific design pattern articles. I think that taking this approach will allow a lot of ColdFusion developers, with no experience with other languages to make the most of the information that's out there, and to ease their way into the world of design patterns. To get you started, here's an excerpt from the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software. This book, by the so called "Gang of Four" is considered the seminal work on software design patterns. The excerpt (chapter 1) is hosted on Macromedia's site and introduces Design Patterns and lists out some of the more common one's you are likely to encounter. Once you have the introduction to design patterns out of the way, here are some of the ColdFusion design pattern articles worth taking a look at: Template Method Pattern
Iterator Pattern
Strategy Pattern
Composite Pattern
More on Composition
More on Polymorphism
Singleton Pattern
Creational Patterns
Facade Pattern
Data Transfer Hash Pattern
If you couple these with one or more of the following books, I think you'll have a good starting point: Headfirst Design Patterns
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software (Gang of Four)
Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design I'd definitely like to see more design pattern articles focused on ColdFusion. If you would too, why not drop the ColdFusion Developers Journal editor, Simon Horwith, an email over at simon(at)horwith(dot)com and let him know you would like to see more coverage in the magazine.

Thoughts on Event Gateways

2004-11-07T11:13:00-05:00

Now that Evet Gateways have officially gotten more coverage (ala MAX), we in the ColdFusion community need to start thinking about the possibilities they open. By piecing together everything we heard at MAX surrounding gateways, we know that Blackstone is going to ship with several included gateways:

Lotus Sametime Gateway (IM)
Jabber/XMPP Gateway (IM)
Directory Watcher Gateway(Looks for new additions to a file system directory)
SMS Gateawy (for sending/receiving SMS text messages)
Asynchronous CFML Gateway (for multi-threaded CFML invocations)

Beyond these gateways, it would be fairly simple (provided you know a little Java) to create additional gateways for communicating with all sorts of additional technologies via protocols other than HTTP. Considering the possibilities, this means you (or a third party) could write a telnet gateway, a gateway for connecting to a messaging service such as JMS (Sean Corfield has already mentioned he's worked on this for an internal project) or MQ Series, or a gateway for communicating with the X10 protocol. The list goes on and on. Themain point here is that the possibilities are limitless. This also opens up a potential new revenue stream for companies wanting to produce and support commercial gateway add-ons for ColdFusion. So, if you don't know Java but need a gateway for a particular application, chances are that a solution would be available from either an open-source or commercial provider. The coolest thing about gateways, though, is that you only need to know Java if you want to write your own. To use and existing gateway, you only need to know ColdFusion as all gateways are implemented via CFCs. What uses for Event Gateways are you thinking about?

Blackstone Sneak

2004-11-04T13:20:00-05:00

I didn't get a chance to blog this yesterday because my wireless connection in the auditorium wouldn't stay up. That, and the demo machine blue screened, so Damon Cooper had to basically just tell us what the sneak would have been, rather than demoing it. Nothing really new here, except I think this may have been the first time that anyone mentioned that the new gateway funcitonality would include an Instant Messaging gateway that included support for Lotus Sametime this interests me because my company uses Sametime).

MAX 2004 Wrap Up

2004-11-04T13:01:00-05:00

MAX 2004 is winding down with only a few hours left to go. Time for a little reflection and some thoughts for next year. Macromedia consistently puts on one of the best conferences I've been to. While it's true that some things go more smoothly than others, and that the choice of location has a lot to do with how things run, all in all, MAX is and always has been a well run event. Hats off to everyone at Macromedia who makes MAX the event that it is. Now, on to a few suggestions. The only real "complaint" I have about the sessions is that the higher level sessions still tend to be to general. From talking with people at the conference, it seems that people want even more "advanced" content that helps them understand the concepts and gives them practical advice on how to apply it. For example, the Hal Helms session on OO ColdFusion was a great introduction to OO development for ColdFusion developers, but I think a lot of attendees were then ready for a follow-up session on applying those ideas and principals. They needed concrete examples, maybe a sample application that they could walk through with a presenter to get more indepth experience with the concepts. This leans me into my next suggestion - include even more interactive Birds of a Feather sessions for people interested in different topics within CF and let the learning and knowledge sharing happen at a more organic level. Do a BOF for CFCs, a BOF for reporting, a BOF for Mach-II, etc. All Macromedia needs to do is provide a room, and maybe a projector, and the rest will happen spontaneously. Steve Rittler has more on this on his blog. Next suggestion is to leave a little more time between sessions. Scheduling them back to back doesn't leave people enough time to make it from one session to the next withoug being disruptive often times. Not sure where MAX is going to be next year, but it's looking like they are considering a West coast city. I think that's a great idea and would love to see MAX in a city like San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. I made some really good connections at this year's MAX and look forward to keeping in touch throughout the year. Hopefully, I'll see many of you again next year!

Still More Sneaks - Dreamweaver

2004-11-03T16:22:00-05:00

Dreamweaver:

Template driven design using XML/XSL
Binding with XSL stylesheets
Code Toolbar ala Homesite
Drag and drop XML/XLS, including repeating regions
Code collapse ala Homesite (4 years ago ;-)
New zoom tool. Marquee selection allows marquee and zoom ala Fireworks