ColdFusion Blog

Good bye blogger

2003-11-11T01:02:00.000-05:00

I've finally done it! I moved my blog off blogger, it can now be found at petefreitag.com. The new RSS feed is http://www.petefreitag.com/rss/web/ (for a web development only feed) or http://www.petefreitag.com/rss/ for all categories.

DNS Stuff

2003-11-03T16:27:00.000-05:00

Here's a handy site for system administrators, and other such people: dnsstuff.com. It has several web based dns and ip lookup tools. One handy one is the ISP cached dns lookup. This is handy for testing round robin dns, and also to see when your dns changes take effect, here's a lookup of www.yahoo.com they are using round robin dns (different ISP's are getting different IP's to goto).

ColdFusion Code Review Tool now $50

2003-10-27T13:35:00.000-05:00

I lowered the price on our ColdFusion CodeReview tool today to $50 (from $200 per developer)! The tool can find problems in your code (such as lack of CFQUERYPARAM, or SELECT *), and you can also easily define your own rules in just a few lines of code. Even if your not interested in the tool, don't forget that the code review rules are posted on our web site - free for everyone to use.

Amazon's Search inside the book

2003-10-23T16:13:00.000-04:00

Amazon is now offering full text book searching, they call "Search inside the book". Starting today you can find books at Amazon.com based on every word inside them, not just the author, or title keywords. Search inside the book -- the name of this new feature -- searches the complete inside text of more than 120,000 books -- all 33 million pages... And while we are on the subject of Amazon,

ColdFusion Training

2003-10-15T13:24:00.000-04:00

I recently learned of two resources for developers looking to improve their ColdFusion skills: Webucator (http://www.webucator.com) - Webucator provides customized onsite ColdFusion training an At-Your-Own-Pace online ColdFusion courses. LearnByHeart (http://www.learnbyheart.com) - LearnByHeart is a Web-based service that helps developers pass Macromedia certification exams by practicing on

What Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets

2003-10-15T00:19:00.000-04:00

Joel Spolsky has a good article titled: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

HackNotes for Linux and Unix

2003-10-13T21:23:00.000-04:00

There is a review of HackNotes Linux and Unix Security portable reference on slashdot. Looks like a pretty good book, I know that the CodeNotes series are good concise references. They are typically under 250 pages (this one is 224 pages) which is nice when many books web developers are buying are thousands of pages. I have CodeNotes for J2EE, CodeNotes for Java, CodeNotes for ASP.NET,

Using Ant to test Concurrency

2003-10-01T14:26:00.000-04:00

Apache Ant is an awesome tool for creating batch builds, and doing all sorts of automated tasks. It was designed to replace make files, but you can use it for lots of things, as my example will show. Ant uses an XML language, with tasks (tags) to compile java classes, run java classes, manipulate the file system, create zip or tar.gz files, run SQL statements, XSL, FTP, etc. It also has an

Parsing RSS with CFMX

2003-09-12T15:38:00.000-04:00

I came up with a code sample to parse RSS with CFMX today based on a question about CFMX XML functions on my local CFUG mailing list. It should do ok with RSS 2.0, and 0.91, and also well formed RSS 0.92. It won't work with RSS 1.0.

Open Up RDS

2003-09-09T20:38:00.000-04:00

A recent thread on CF-Talk asked if anyone had documentation for the RDS protocol, or if anyone had tried to crack it. RDS works over http, so its possible to just use a protocol analizer to capture the communication between CF Studio, or Dreamweaver and the ColdFusion server. While that is possible, the best solution would be for Macromedia to simply document how it works. I suggest that you

PostgreSQL and ColdFusion

2003-09-05T00:37:00.000-04:00

Jochem van Dieten has a good resource on the PostgreSQL for ColdFusion developers. It has things such as queries to list tables, DDL for creating client varaible storage tables, and other tips and tricks. Check it out if you haven't played with PostgreSQL or even if you have.

CFYEILD

2003-08-28T01:47:00.000-04:00

Here's an idea for a new tag in ColdFusion, CFYEILD. Consider a web site that receives a several concurrent requests. ColdFusion will create N threads to process the requests, if there are more than N concurrent requests, they sit in a queue. The java thread object has a method called yeild() which when called allows other threads to run, it's kind of a way of saying, if anyone else want's to

A Good, Free Log File analysis tool - awstats

2003-08-27T18:27:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of free http log file analysis tools out there that haven't been updated since the mid 90's, awstats however is both free, and up to date. It looks a bit like web trends (though I haven't used web trends in several years). Here's an online demo. awstats can be used on several web servers including IIS, and Apache. You can either have generate static html files, or run with a perl

2003-08-27T14:31:00.000-04:00

Moving SSL Certs from IIS to Apache I found some instructions for converting SSL certificates generated for IIS to private key, and cert files you can use on unix, or Apache for windows. First Export your IIS certificate into a pfx file (this is something you should do anyways for backup) Run mmc.exe Click the 'Console' menu and then click 'Add/Remove Snap-in'.

2003-08-20T00:27:00.000-04:00

MyIE2 - IE Based fast web browser MyIE2 released a new version of their web browser this week. I downloaded it today, and I'm quite impressed. MyIE2 uses MS IE to render and display content so everything that works in IE, works the same in MyIE. MyIE has a much smaller memory footprint than MSIE. I ran a quick test by visiting 3 web sites in both web browsers and

2003-08-19T22:04:00.000-04:00

SoBig - SoAnnoying I was receiving the SoBig virus at a rate of over one message per minute today. Most of them were sent to pfreitag@cfdev.com I disabled this account today so I could get some work done. I am *not* going to enable that address again once the virus subsides, I mainly get spam and viruses sent to that address. So if you need to

2003-08-19T21:23:00.000-04:00

The Google API - CFX_Google When the google api (an web service to use google's services) came out last year, I wrote a Java CFX tag called CFX_Google avaliable for free download with source code from cfdev. The CFX tag supports searches, and spell check, and returns results in a query object, there is an example and documentation. Jason Dowdel asked me today if the

2003-08-18T23:48:00.000-04:00

Real World Linux Security I read part of Real World Linux Security this weekend. It's a very detailed book that covers a wide range of security topics, from an author with lots of security experience. Some of the topics include adaptive firewalls (that log and block out intruders), how to be prepared in the event that a breach

2003-08-14T23:27:00.000-04:00

Cross Platform Techniques The post I lost earlier today due to the power outage had a simple way of checking to see if your on a unix OS at runtime, and also some tips for writing cross platform coldfusion.

2003-08-14T23:03:00.000-04:00

got power? I just got my power back about an hour ago (I'm in Syracuse NY). I was in the middle of posting a long blog entry when we lost our internet connection this afternoon, and I lost the entire post when I submitted it, I'll rewrite it later... Our office still had power when I left, but as I biked (I cycle to work

2003-08-13T15:18:00.000-04:00

Search Engine Safe URL's in Apache 2 I've figured out an easy way to employ search engine safe url's on unix and apache2. It has always been possible to implement them with mod_rewrite, but its difficult to do globally for url's like this: www.site.com/page.cfm/id/4 Here's the script

2003-08-12T17:15:00.000-04:00

Google Calculator To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you'd like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic (5+2*2 or 2^20), more complicated math (sine(30 degrees) or e^(i pi)+1),

2003-08-12T00:08:00.000-04:00

Worm's a comin' Feel's like a storm is brewing, I've gotten a few emails today from various security lists about the W32/Blaster worm. This worm effects Windows NT 4, 2000, 2003, and XP, here's the info from M$. Block ports 135, 139 and 445 (RPC DCOM) in your firewall. By the way here are few security mailing lists you should

2003-08-07T15:10:00.000-04:00

Searching without Verity Sometimes you need to search a database query without using verity. In general Verity should be used when possible, because it will yeild much better results, at better performance than the solution I'm about to show. But there are reasons for not using verity, for instance compatibility with BlueDragon, a highly

2003-08-05T21:55:00.000-04:00

Classpath Migration Issue in CFMX 6.1 I Installed CFMX 6.1 on our live server today, and found that my Java classpath settings had been screwed up during the migration process. All the slashes were missing in the path, so a path like c:\java\activmail.jar would show up as c:javaactivmail.jar in 6.1. The server in question was running Win2k, which had been

2003-08-05T11:28:00.000-04:00

Updating ColdFusion Studio / Homesite for CFMX 6.1 If your going to apply the Homesite CFStudio Tag Updater for CFMX 6.1 make sure you first apply the CFMX 6.0 tag updater it doesn't appear that the 6.1 updater is cumulative.

2003-08-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

CFML Language History Macromedia's web site is going to be busy today, lots of new stuff on there today. They released a CFML Language history document, that details the changes since CF 4.01. That is handy for me because I usually have to write CFML code that runs on multiple versions. I'm sure many consultants, and free lancers work with

2003-08-05T11:19:00.000-04:00

RedSky at Night Sailors Delight! Macromedia Released ColdFusion 6.1 early this morning (code named RedSky). I'm really impressed with it, and I will be updating our server with it today. Several people have posted blog entries about it already. Dan G. Switzer, II keep a list of all related articles Sean Corfield has several posts including

2003-08-01T02:18:00.000-04:00

Interim RSS Feed I have a RSS feed for this blog again - you can use it until I move the blog somewhere else: http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/services/rssify/rssify.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcfm.blogspot.com

2003-07-30T12:48:00.000-04:00

Validating HTML/XHTML behind a firewall Someone asked the question on the evolt mailing list about validating XHTML behind a firewall. The most popular way to validate XHTML is using the w3c HTML validator, however the only options are to enter a url, or to upload a file. That can be cumbersome, so steve clay wrote a handy php script that crawls a url and uploads the file then displays the

2003-07-30T12:25:00.000-04:00

Query of Query in CF5 bug If you are doing a QofQ's in CF5 with an ORDER BY, the columns in the order by statement must be in the SELECT statement, otherwise it throws an exception. So if you have a column that your only using for sorting you must add it to the select statement, even if you don't need it in the resulting query. This bug does not exist in CFMX thankfully, I found it while

2003-07-23T14:17:00.000-04:00

New products at CFDEV We have two new products at cfdev, one has already been released, the other is in beta. The first is a spell checker for flash text boxes, it was released a few weeks ago. The second product, which I have been working on for the past few months is a ColdFusion Code Review tool. It is a ColdFusion application that runs through your code and finds security, performance,

2003-07-23T13:54:00.000-04:00

No RSS I haven't had an RSS feed for a while now, I'm still figuring out what I want to do about it. The most probable action will be to setup my own site. I was going to upgrade to blogger pro, but you can't buy it now for some reason, their site has said check back in a week for the last 3 months. We do incidentially now have a RSS feed for the news section on cfdev. It's RSS 2.0.

2003-07-16T18:28:00.000-04:00

Interview with PostgreSQL developers Here's a good interview with some PostgreSQL developers.

2003-06-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

Iterating over an Enumeration with CFMX I tried writing some CFML code to iterate over a java.util.Enumeration, a fairly common thing to do in java, but was plagued with java.lang.IllegalAccessException's. IllegalAccess exceptions usually occurr when you try to call a method using reflection (which CFMX does) that doesn't exist. However I'm quite sure that hasMoreElements() is a method of

2003-06-19T13:21:00.000-04:00

GetTempDirectory() returns a different path in MX I noticed today that GetTempDirectory() returns a different path than it did in CF5 and prior versions. In CFMX it returns cfusionmx/runtime/servers/default/SERVER-INF/temp/wwwroot-tmp. I'm not quite sure why this is, because the java System property java.io.tmpdir = C:\WINNT\TEMP\ on my machine. I would have thought they would use that value

2003-06-18T19:34:00.000-04:00

Query of Queries with maxrows bug I found a bug today in CFMX, CF5 executes the code as you would expect. Essentially if you do a query of query with maxrows, and then do another q of q on that result, the resulting q of q is using the wrong query and returns the wrong number of rows.

2003-06-17T14:50:00.000-04:00

Using UUID's for CFTOKEN and Database client storage Just a heads up if your using UUID's for CFTOKEN values with database client storage when upgrading to CFMX, be sure to change the size of the cfid field in the CDATA and CGLOBAL tables. The cfid field stores both the cfid and cftoken value as follows cfid:cftoken. The cfid is usually around 7 characters, and the cftoken when using a UUID is

2003-06-10T23:36:00.000-04:00

Patterns Central This web site: Patterns Central was pointed out to me today by a coworker. It has articles, and forums about design patterns.

2003-06-04T17:55:00.000-04:00

Compiling the CFMX Apache Module from source code I put up a howto on cfdev for installing the ColdFusion MX Apache module from source on linux, as well as a howto for installing Apache 2.0.46 from source, and a howto get php working on Apache2. To compile the apache module you need to install Apache from source, the RPM installation I had didn't include the apxs tool which compiles the module

2003-05-30T14:15:00.000-04:00

Customizing Debugging Output In ColdFusion MX you can customize the debugging output by editing or adding files to the wwwroot/WEB-INF/debug directory. I modified the dockable.cfm file so the window with debugging information would not pop up automatically by commenting out line 229. You can also add your own file to the directory and it will show up

2003-05-27T23:32:00.000-04:00

Go to MIT for Free MIT is publishing course material online at its MIT Open Courseware web site. One relevant course is the Laboratory in Software Engineering. The good stuff is under Lecture Notes where you can find PDF documents containing the lectures (including design patterns, case studies, and the concepts/fundamentals of Software

2003-05-27T23:20:00.000-04:00

I'm Back I've been out of town quite a bit this month, thus the absence of posts. In the beginning of the month I was at the ColdFusion Cruise-n-Learn, it was a great time - I look forward to the next one (word has it that it will be leaving from the west cost, and possibly going to Alaska). Feedback

2003-04-30T19:47:00.000-04:00

Clustered JDBC Here's an open source project that CFMX and J2EE developers will find interesting: c-jdbc which stands for Clustered JDBC. It's basically a JDBC driver that lets you cluster several databases (any db with a JDBC driver pretty much), you can even have a cluster of different types of databases that operate on the same schema (eg

2003-04-30T18:13:00.000-04:00

Working with PostgreSQL I'm working on migrating a SQL Server database to PostgreSQL. So far it has gone smooth, I did run into two issues today however. I wrote some scripts that generate the DDL for PostgreSQL from my SQL Server metadata, the scripts also grab all the data, and create INSERT statements (I should probably be using COPY statements). So I

2003-04-28T15:52:00.000-04:00

ColdFusion Conference on a Boat Actually it's on a large boat, a cruise ship and will be sailing in the Caribbean! You have until thursday (5/1/03) to signup, there is still some room left for you. I'm ofcourse talking about the 1st. Annual ColdFusion Cruise-N-Learn, it's a week long cruise where you can learn about ColdFusion, and hang out

2003-04-24T00:24:00.000-04:00

Macromedia Central, and Synchronized Applications Macromedia has a presentation about the upcoming Macromedia Central platform. The presentation notes that there are 750,000 Flash developers, and there is a $2.2B market for these "Permium Internet Content Applications" (Jupiter Research). I hope all the flash developers don't work on these because that only leaves each

2003-04-23T23:45:00.000-04:00

Microsoft Research You can find lots of research infromation from the Microsoft Resarch web site. Microsoft funds quite a bit of research, and works with universities a lot. You will want to check out the projects page that lists all the projects they are or have worked on. Some of the research areas include Databases, Software Engineering, Security, Performance and

2003-04-22T14:23:00.000-04:00

New ColdFusion MX book published A new ColdFusion MX book called The ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook was recently published by SAMS. I Co-Authored the book with Brad Leupen, and Chris Reeves. The main difference between this book and other ColdFusion books is the format. It is setup as follows: Technique - Explain the problem in one or two sentences Example - Show the

2003-04-18T01:12:00.000-04:00

Returning TOP N Records Returning only the first N records in a SQL query differs quite a bit between database platforms. Here's some samples: Microsoft SQL Server SELECT TOP 10 column FROM table PostgreSQL and MySQL SELECT column FROM table LIMIT 10 Oracle SELECT column FROM table WHERE ROWNUM <= 10 Due to these differences if you want to

2003-04-16T18:02:00.000-04:00

SourceForge has RSS feeds SourceForge, the huge repository for open source projects now has RSS feeds for each project including Project News, File Releases, Documentation, and project summary. This must be a new feature, I haven't noticed it in the past, but I could be wrong. Anyways that is a good way to keep upto date with

2003-04-15T18:24:00.000-04:00

Free ColdFusion Magazine There is a free monthly ColdFusion magazine in the works. You can signup to receive it throught the web site. The magazine is being put together by Pablo Varando of EasyCFM.com.

2003-04-14T17:35:00.000-04:00

Confirming Transaction support Want to know if your ColdFusion database driver supports transactions (the tag)? I was wondering how I might test this, and I came up with a solution. The code I wrote essentially creates a dead lock if transactions are supported by the db driver, if the timeout is reached an exception is thrown, and we know that our database and driver support

2003-04-04T15:52:00.000-05:00

Fast XSLT - Compiled XSL with XSLTC An article on xml.com - Fast XSLT talks about the race for building faster XSL transformers. One approch focused on is generating a "translet" (a java class) from the style sheet, then executing the compiled class. Compiled execution is great, but compiling isnt. I would hope that application servers that plan to use XSLTC would do it in a transparent way (

2003-04-03T17:47:00.000-05:00

Using CustomTags in ColdFusion Using custom tags in the presentation layer can greatly organize your code. Here's a quick start guide that I wrote up. Building a simple ColdFusion custom tag is as easy as: A simple custom tag create a file called todaysdate.cfm: #DateFormat(Now(), "mm/dd/yyyy")# Then place todaysdate.cfm in ColdFusion server's CustomTags

2003-04-03T12:22:00.000-05:00

More bashing Thanks to my brother Steve, I was able to get my backtracking cd to the way I wanted it to Just add the following to your ~/.bashrc or if you want to make this work system wide add this to /etc/bashrc: #redefine pushd and popd so they don't output the directory stack pushd() { builtin pushd "$@" > /dev/null } popd() { builtin popd "$@" > /dev/null } #alias cd

2003-04-01T18:55:00.000-05:00

Backtracking with bash I was working with linux quite a bit today, and frequently changing between directories, when I wondered if there was a way to go back to the directory I was in previously. Turns out there is a way: cd ~- So if I was doing something like this: [pete@bigred /]$ cd /etc [pete@bigred etc]$ cd /usr/local [pete@bigred local]$ cd ~- [pete@bigred etc]$ pwd /

2003-03-25T19:38:00.000-05:00

Apache Module source code included in Updator 3 Damon Cooper (of Macromedia) pointed out today on CF-Linux: "By the way, you guys knew that source code and build instructions for the Apache web connectors was now included, correct?" That's cool, I beleive its only on the Unix versions though, I couldn't find it in my windows install. I'll check my linux install when I get around to it

2003-03-18T12:52:00.000-05:00

Backing up ColdFusion Datasources If you want to backup datasources on ColdFusion 5 and below on windows, backup the following registry keys: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Allaire\ColdFusion\CurrentVersion\DataSources HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC Create two reg files, and then just double click the reg file on the server you want to backup on. If your only using OLE DB datasources

2003-03-18T12:34:00.000-05:00

Editing Text Files Developers and system administrators often need to open files of types that aren't mapped to a particular program. This ofcourse requires that slow "Open With" window to pop up. A trick I recently found is to add a shortcut to the right click menu, to open files with notepad. This is done by editing the registry, under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\ There may or may not be a key

2003-03-15T11:30:00.000-05:00

Server side Flash Detection It would be useful if it worked reliably. According to the Flash 6 release notes "The player installation process now configures the browser to add the Flash MIME-type (application/x-shockwave-flash) to the HTTP Accept header. This enables server-side Flash Player detection." This worked fine on Internet Explorer on Windows, but with Netscape 7.02 using the flash

2003-03-13T00:21:00.000-05:00

Heading North I'm heading to Toronto today for MXNorth. There will also be two other people from CFDEV there (Greg, and Rob). We are sponsering Friday's lunch, and we also have a booth, so stop by and chat with us.

2003-03-06T19:52:00.000-05:00

Macromedia got a new site I realize I'm a day late on the news here, but I'm quite impressed with the amount of feedback Macromedia's new web site has generated. Just about every mailing list I'm on has a large tangent oriented thread that started with a mention of the new site. I wish I could generate that much feedback when I redesign a web site (did you notice I changed the top graphic of

2003-02-28T17:48:00.000-05:00

Turning a JDBC Result set into a ColdFusion query Recent discussion on the CFCDev mailing list (at cfczone.org) shows how to return a ColdFusion query object from a Java class using a JDBC result set (java.sql.ResultSet). The solution posed by both Brandon Purcell, and I was to pass your JDBC result set in to the constructor of the coldfusion.sql.QueryTable class. Joe Eugene tested the

2003-02-13T17:50:00.000-05:00

More Info about ColdFusion MX on Redhat 8 Dustin Krysak contacted me in response to a recent blog entry ColdFusion MX works on Redhat 8. He me provided a detailed checklist for installing ColdFusion MX on Redhat 8, and allowed me to post it to cfdev: Steps Taken to Install CFMX on RedHat 8. I should point out that Verity doesn't work on Redhat 8, and Redhat 8 still isn't officially supported

2003-02-04T18:11:00.000-05:00

Disk Considerations on CFMX When you install ColdFusion MX (in C:\cfusionmx\) with an alternate web root directory (lets say d:\web) the WEB-INF directory stays in c:\cfusionmx\wwwroot\WEB-INF\. That isn't a huge deal but it has implications when you are using a different hard drive for your web files... Lets say your C:\ drive is slower than the D:\ where you keep all your web files

2003-01-31T15:41:00.000-05:00

FTP Scripts on windows I found this Microsoft KB article today 96269 which shows you how to use the ftp program that comes with all versions of windows an automate a file transfer. ftp -s:script.txt ftp.server.com The contents of script.txt might look like this: yourUserName yourPassword bin cd /files put file.zip bye This is handy for administration between servers, but keep in

2003-01-13T19:36:00.000-05:00

CFMX works on Redhat 8 I am subscribed to the CF-Linux list hosted at houseoffusion.com and I see a lot of people having problems installing CFMX on linux. Especially on Redhat 7.3. Macromedia has said that there were problems related to Java in RedHat 7.3 and urged customers to use RedHat 7.2. Today I installed CFMX on RedHat 8.0 after running redhat's up2date utility (similar to windows

2003-01-13T19:30:00.000-05:00

ColdFusion 5 on Windows .NET Enterprise Server RC1 I tried installing CF5 a the release candidate of Microsoft's next server platform .NET Server, the results - negative. Ofcourse my first hint should have been when I first ran setup.exe it told me I was attempting to install ColdFusion on an unrecognized version of windows. I clicked continue anyways, and the install seamed to go smooth. I had

2002-12-17T12:19:00.000-05:00

Sys-Con creates developer web site Sys-Con created a developer portal that covers Java, .NET, linux, Web Services, etc.The site is seams very similar to slash dot. developer.sys-con.com

2002-11-08T16:32:00.000-05:00

Slashlog - open source cfmx / mysql blog Speaking of open source, Daniel Chicayban posted to CF-Linux wednesday an announcement of his open source project slashlog 0.1. The software is designed for unix but should work ok on windows according to the web site.

2002-11-08T15:27:00.000-05:00

XSL Tag now open source I recently decided to make my Java CFX tag CFX_XSLT free and open source (it was previously free for non commercial use). You can get it from our XML resource page.

2002-11-08T15:26:00.000-05:00

Back from Meet The Makers I just got back from Meet The Makers in NYC. It was a very good conference where I met a bunch of top of the line web developers, and talked to some product vendors. I came back with a ton of new ideas.

2002-10-17T15:29:00.000-04:00

Tab completion in Windows 2000 One of my favorite features of unix is tab completion. You can type the first letter of a directory, and then hit tab and it will complete the rest for you. This is enabled by default on Windows XP, but on windows 2000 it isn't. Here's how you enable it. Run regedit.exe and browse to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar

2002-10-16T15:09:00.000-04:00

Looking for Java Blogs? There is a big list of about 40 Java Blogs. Click the java.blog logo:

2002-10-14T12:03:00.000-04:00

How to make ColdFusion MX go to sleep Many people have had the need for a ColdFusion page to sleep, typically between iterations of a loop. There is a tag called CFX_Sleep in the Tag Gallery, but in ColdFusion MX you don't need a CFX tag to make the current processing thread sleep using the static sleep method on the java.lang.Thread class, part of the standard java platform. Because CFMX

2002-10-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

Uptime for Windows 2000/NT Almost every unix distro comes with a utility called "uptime" that tells you how long your server has been running. Unfortunitly no such tool comes with windows, but there is a pretty fool proof way to determine the date you computer was last started. Type the following in to the command prompt. net statistics server The net command is very useful, it allows you

2002-10-09T15:57:00.000-04:00

Bat Files to restart services I added some batch files to the Code Samples section of the cfdev site today. The bat files can be used to restart ColdFusion 5, MX, or IIS services on Windows NT/2000/XP. Bat file to restart ColdFusion MX Bat file to Restart ColdFusion 5 Bat file to Restart IIS Web, FTP, SMTP Services Bat files are handy because you can restart multiple services with

2002-10-08T00:10:00.000-04:00

CFC's - private works like protected I noticed yesterday that when you use access="private" in a CFC function, inherited CFC's also have access to this function. In object oriented languages such as Java, C++, or C# this type of access is known as "protected" access. This may be a bug in CFC's, or it may just be a bug in the documentation, which states "private: available only to the component

2002-09-25T16:18:00.000-04:00

Have you tuned your JVM on ColdFusion MX yet? ColdFusion's move to java gives developers and system administrators a wealth of performance tuning options. This is due to the fact that the runtime for ColdFusion is now pluggable (the JVM), we don't have to rely completly on Macromedia to make performance optomizations, we can use different JVM's and lots of different JVM settings to improve the

2002-09-10T00:32:00.000-04:00

Easter Egg In ColdFusion MX Found! I found the easter egg in ColdFusion MX, thanks to a hint given out on the cfguru list by a Macromedia Engineer. The Tip that he gave was: "I think I may have made the ColdFusion MX easter egg just a little too hard to find. Here's a hint: What would the browser language preference be of the most dedicated CF developer? Then go hunting in the admin." Tom

2002-08-23T13:11:00.000-04:00

Top Ten Tips to using XPath and XPointer An article on xml.com Top ten tips to using XPath and XPointer

2002-08-20T00:11:00.000-04:00

Undocumented Query Methods in ColdFusion MX I found some undocumented methods that you can perform on a query by using Java Reflection. The methods are summarized here: void query.first() - jump to the beginning of a query void query.last() - jump to the last value in a query boolean query.isFirst() - true if we are looking at the first row boolean query.isLast() - true if we are looking

2002-08-18T23:16:00.000-04:00

Bea J-Rocket JVM was designed specifically for server applications. Jon Hall posted this to the CF-Talk mailing list with some impressive execution times when plugged into ColdFusion MX. I'm going to give it a try...

2002-07-18T14:14:00.000-04:00

Amazon Launches Web Services Amazon launched a web services developer kit with examples of how to access written in Java.

2002-07-10T12:44:00.000-04:00

PetStore for Web Services Released Sun recently released and update to their J2EE example application the "Pet Store", to showcase their new Web Services support. Learn more about it here.

2002-07-09T16:54:00.000-04:00

RSS Feeds I added a link to a RSS feed from VoidStar for this blog. RSS Feed for this blog

2002-07-09T15:42:00.000-04:00

CFMX Tag Definitions VTM for CF Studio Studio 4.5 and 5.0 VTM files for CFMX: http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusionstudio/productinfo/resources/tag_updaters/

2002-06-13T19:58:00.000-04:00

CFC Web Services Site Currently has 3 web services posted 2 charting services, and slash dot news feed. webservices.isitedesign.com

2002-06-06T22:33:00.000-04:00

Examining WSDL A great article on xml.com that explains WDSL, it's origins, and its shortcomings. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/05/15/ends.html

2002-06-06T22:24:00.000-04:00

Installing ColdFusion MX and .NET on the same Server When installing CFMX and .NET to be on the same computer, Chris White pointed out on CF-Talk today that problems often occurr when .NET is installed before ColdFusion MX. Problems can occurr in both ColdFusion and .NET. Chris recommends the following installation path: Install IIS Apply IIS Security Fix Install ColdFusion MX Install

2002-06-06T21:26:00.000-04:00

eXcelon - Java C++ Data Management I came across eXcelon today, they have some interesting products. ObjectStore is a server that can be accessed in Java or C++ as an Object Oriented Database, or as a "Data Server" (as an abstraction of your RDBMS database). They also have a XML database product called XIS, supports XQuery, etc.

2002-06-04T22:20:00.000-04:00

XML Mailing Lists I subscribed to some XML mailing lists today at lists.xml.org, xml-dev, xml-dailynews, and xml-newsletter.

2002-06-03T19:04:00.000-04:00

Java Code Samples Sun Released an updated and revised listing of Java Code Samples.

2002-06-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

Welcome I've decided to try to actually start posting to this blog. So here it goes... I'm the CTO for a company called CFDEV.COM, my responsibilities include learning technology that may be of use to our company, managing product development, and building resources for our site. I monitor, and participate in several mailing lists including: CF-Talk, CF-Linux, JRun-Talk, CFX from

2002-03-13T21:05:00.000-05:00

Welcome To the ColdFusion Blogger Pete Freitag CTO, CFDEV.COM