Cutter's Crossing

Adobe has released ColdFusion 10. The engineering team has done a fantastic job putting this release together. Here's a short list of some of what's new:

• Improved/Updated
  • caching
  • ORM
  • webservices
  • scheduler
  • hotfix management
  • security
  • MS Exchange integration
  • security
  • Solr
  • charting (now html 5)
  • Java integration
  • Flex and AIR lazy loading
  • VFS
  • more!
• html 5 support
• websockets
• RESTful services
• greater cfscript parity
• geo-tagging
• CFC auto constructors
• method chaining
• closures
• Tomcat (no more JRun)
• more!

Wow! A lot of changes and additions. The team has been in overdrive, and it all looks spectacular. Download the free Developer's Edition and start playing.

As a bonus, they also release an update to ColdFusion Builder as well!

This entry was posted on May 15, 2012 at 7:58 AM and has received 464 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

The other day, Adobe released a new Security Hotfix for it's ColdFusion server. There were a number of things addressed in the hotfix, to help protect against Denial of Service attack using a hash algorithm collision. (My wife would say I sound like Charlie Brown's teacher right about now.) Ok, the important thing is you need to update your server.

Now for the fun part. We loaded the fix to our testing servers to run our app around the block prior to pushing this up to production. And, it's a good thing we did. We're preparing for a large deployment, and testing is pretty heavy right now. First thing in is that a form would no longer submit, throwing a 500 error every time. I didn't show me a 500 error, just a blank page. I had to look at Firebug to see the error code response. Now, if you've ever encountered a 500 error from the server then you know they don't typically tell you much. I reproduced the error locally and then went looking through the log files on the server.

In a multi-server configuration there are two core areas to look at log files. The first are the basic JRun logs. On a Windows systems, these files are located in the C:\JRun4\logs folder. Here you will typically find a {instance}-out.log file, and a {instance}-event.log file, for each ColdFusion instance you have configured. Right out of the gate you have admin-event and admin-out logs for the JRun administrator, and cfusion-event and cfusion-out for the default ColdFusion instance. I checked both files for my instance, and saw there weren't any items to tell me about the 500 error, so I then went looking at the ColdFusion logs.

Each ColdFusion instance has it's own set of log files, that you can see in the logs viewer in the ColdFusion Administrator. That said, the ColdFusion Administrator is not really the best place to go through these files, especially when you're really having issues. At this point, you just want to open them yourself. First, you have to find them. You do this through your instance, C:\JRun4\servers\{instance}\cfusion.ear\cfusion.war\WEB-INF\cfusion\logs. You'll probably find multiple log files here, from the application and eventgateway and mail logs, to individual logs from cflog calls.

Our issue, with submitting our form, was answered by the JRun -event logs, which gave me a few error messages saying something like this:

"Dude! What is that!?!" Well, luckily I had installed my security hotfix, locally, just that morning, so I remember reading over the instructions. In it's notes it had stated the following:

4. Customers who want to change postParameterLimit, go to {ColdFusion-Home}/lib for Server installation or {ColdFusion-Home}/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib for Multiserver or J2EE installation. Open file neo-runtime.xml, after line
   view plain copy to clipboard print about

     ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
   "<var name='postSizeLimit'><number>100.0</number></var>" 1"<var name='postSizeLimit'><number>100.0</number></var>"
   
   add the below line and you can change 100 with desired number.
   view plain copy to clipboard print about

     ColdFISH is developed by Jason Delmore. Source code and license information available at coldfish.riaforge.org
   "<var name='postParametersLimit'><number>100.0</number></var>" 1"<var name='postParametersLimit'><number>100.0</number></var>"
   

Just a heads up, that neo-runtime.xml file is minified, so you'll want to Find "postSizeLimit" to get that statement in the right place. We tried that postParametersLimit value (100) and found that our form had more than that (many were hidden, but that's another post all together), so we adjusted the number to 200. After restarting the instance again, we tested the form once more with complete success.

Hopefully this will help someone else avoid this issue. It's important to remember that Adobe does try to document these types of situations with hotfixes, so when you run into issues they should be your first source of troubleshooting information.

This entry was posted on March 27, 2012 at 2:41 PM and has received 892 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Because I've had to search on this three times in the last year, I thought it'd be a good idea to document this here, for myself and others. There were a number of important changes that can trip you up from version to version and, if you know which version the changes came in it can be beneficial.

First is a change that affects JSON output, though it's not specifically about JSON. The ColdFusion 9.01 updater (the current base install, at the time of this post) addressed Bug 82980 by removing ColdFusion Debug Output from direct CFC requests. This was only important if you had debugging output turned on in the Administrator, but caused lots of issues when testing ajax applications in development environments that kept that setting on by default.

Unfortunately, Adobe made some changes to JSON serialization that were not only unpopular, but technically dead wrong. They were trying to resolve the treatment of numbers in JSON serialization. Numbers were being converted to floats (1 became 1.0, 12 became 12.0, and so forth), so Adobe changed that by converting all numbers into strings (11 became "11", 17.24 became "17.24"). This was wrong too, as numbers weren't numeric anymore. At the time it raised quite a stir.

They fixed this (Bug 83638) really quickly, releasingCumulative Hotfix 1 for ColdFusion 9.01, which fixed the issue of integers being converted to float and having them as numeric values (ie: [1,12,true,"this var",17.24]). Hurray! Except....

Enter the improperly titled Cumulative Hotfix 2 for ColdFusion 9.01. I say this because it really isn't 'cumulative'. Most things are straight, from a cumulative standpoint, with the seeming exception of the fix to JSON formatting. If you have not applied CHF 1 prior to installing CHF 2, then you will still have issues with JSON formatting.

Overall, Hotfix 2 is great, fixing many bugs. The install is crazy/scary, and must be followed to the letter to prevent major issues, but it's worth it. As long as you did apply CHF 1 first, that is. Thankfully the hotfix/upgrade install process is much better in ColdFusion 10.

Big thanks to Ray for helping me to realize that I wasn't crazy, and pointing me in the right directions for all of this info. Hopefully this helps someone down the line.

This entry was posted on February 28, 2012 at 1:23 PM and has received 998 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Yes, everyone is talking about it. That's why I waited a day or two to post the info. Adobe has put ColdFusion 10 up on Adobe Labs, opening it's public beta cycle prior to full release. That's right folks, ColdFusion is finally hitting the double digits, and this release just continues to improve this great platform.

There are some big changes. First are some overdue upgrades, like retiring the JRun JEE server, replacing it with Tomcat. Web Services support is upgraded, moving to more current form of Axis, and adding native support for creating RESTful web services. Exchange integration support is now upgraded to support MS Exchange 2010. Java and Solr integrations are improved as well. Finally, we get hotfix notifications and one touch upgrade directly within the administrator. I'm just getting started.

ColdFusion has always been known for making the hard things easy, and it looks like ColdFusion 10 is no exception. Adobe's engineering team listened to customer feedback, giving us a lot of new toys to play with, including some great language enhancements. Highlights include important new array functions, app specific in-memory file system, MIME type checking on file uploads, an implicit CFC constructor, method chaining, and much, much more.

Oh, and closures. Did I mention closures? Not sure how this one will play out, yet, but I look forward to seeing what people come up with. There's also websockets, media player changes, and an entirely new charting to work with. Just scratching the surface here.

Yes, there is a lot of new stuff. And, to top it all off, Adobe placed ColdFusion Builder 2.01 in Beta at the same time. There are a lot of bug fixes in here, along with the CF 10 support and more. Did I mention both the server, and the IDE, have some HTML 5 goodness baked in as well? No? You'll just have to download them and start playing. This'll be fun.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2012 at 4:14 PM and has received 966 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

My, how time flies when you're having fun! It seems like only yesterday that I was welcoming in 2011, and now we're here a year later. So many things have happened in the last year, and rereading that post I see that I missed some things I should've done, but let's take a look in retrospect.

I wrote 27 blog posts in 2011. This is nothing, compared to guys like Ray Camden or Ben Nadel, but for me it was quite a bit, especially when you consider that between March and August I released only one post. Very early in the year, I began a series on creatingmany sites with one codebase. In the process, the series has evolved to contain a fairly detailed primer in ColdFusion application architecture (because of it's importance to this process), has currently spanned 8 separate posts, and was even referenced by Sean Corfield in his great presentations on the same topic. 2012 will see the completion of that CF app discussion, and gradually move it back to the MSOC topic itself, as there is still a ton to talk about there, and a lot of interest in the topic. I also began a series on the jqGrid JQuery plugin. jqGrid is another Data Grid visualization tool (I have now written about three, including Ext JS and DataTables), and is a clear choice for those who must use JQuery. (To be fair, JQueryUI is working on a grid component, but they are still behind the curve, and way behind Sencha.) Finally, one common thread seen in the majority of my posts, is how much I've embraced cfscript. I wrote a lot of things, on a variety of topics, but most of my code examples were pure scripted examples.

Now let's talk about some other departures from the norm for Cutter.

You did not see a lot of content around Ext JS. In fact, I stopped writing Ext JS books. This is not, in any way, a reflection on my feelings for Ext JS. I still believe that Sencha has built one of the best client-side libraries for web application development. In evaluating the overall ROI, I realized that I was writing more for the community than the money, and that my reach was greater through my blog, while giving me flexibility on when and what I deliver from a content standpoint. That said, I didn't have a single project this year that used Ext JS, so had very little time to experiment and write about it. This year, I'm going to expand on a personal project, and get back to some great Ext JS content for my readers.

You, also, did not see me speak at any conferences this past year. Nor at any user group meetings. This wasn't because I didn't want to, but because of some more personal reasons. I'm not going to go in depth here, other than to say that I've had some long standing health issues that required me to have some surgery done on my mouth. (Mark Drew is making a joke right now...) Aside from the fact that this has been very costly (chewing up any conference/travel budget), it also meant that my speech has been affected for a good part of the year. Thankfully this experience is (mostly) over now, and I hope to get back to presenting sometime this year. Any user group looking for a speaker this year, please contact me through the Contact link on this blog.

One group I am hoping to speak to this year is the Northeast Florida CFUG. I have to call Mike back, but he's looking to get things kicked off again, and I want to help it be successful. If you're in or around the Jacksonville area, make sure to keep an eye on the site for upcoming events.

One other thing I'm looking to do is to migrate all of my projects into GitHub. I've been using Git at work, and I am loving it, and I think combining GitHub with RIAForge is a great way to promote the terrific technologies we work with every day. I will make the time, I promise.

This comes to the final discussion of this post, Adobe. I again had the pleasure of being an Adobe Community Professional this past year. Due to my health issues, I didn't get to do everything I would've wanted to this year, but I've tried to be a good supporter. There are some fabulous things coming in ColdFusion Zeus and, by extension, to ColdFusion Builder as well. There has been a lot of hub-bub over Adobe's communications flubs regarding Flash, mobile, and Flex. I've avoided much of the discussion, other than to say "be patient and watch". Flash isn't going away, and neither is Flex. HTML 5 is a beautiful thing, if you aren't developing desktop browser applications (i.e. You're only writing for mobile/tablet development). There, that is my whole contribution to that discussion. Give it a rest.

2012 will be a fantastic year. Set yourself some clear, definable goals. Break them down, step by step, and write the steps down on paper. Each successive step, print out in large letters and place it somewhere where you will see it each and every day. Set yourself up to succeed, and you will. Have a great year, everyone, and I can't wait to hear what you have planned for 2012.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2012 at 11:01 AM and has received 773 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I discovered this one a while back, but forgot to write a post on it. Did you realize that formatting queries could affect the execution of scripted queries? Consider the following function:

It's a pretty basic function, with a query to check submitted form fields against the database. Right? So, why would it error? "Error? What error?" Yes, it errors. Here's the code for a basic call, along with a dump to output that to the page:

Dumping that result shows you the error coming through:

So, to get at the root of this I had to comment out all of my try/catch work:

Whoops! Forgot my onError handler. OK, I'll comment that out. Here we go! Now we get to the meat of it (the dump was the same, but sometimes you just want to see the raw error):

Did you get anything out of that? Neither did I. The first thing I did was go review the scripted 'new Query()' documentation on the Adobe site. That didn't help. According to the documentation, everything appears to be fine. The next thing I did was look at other examples out there. Yep, still good. Next, I started comparing to other instances of code that I know to work. Wait a minute....Look at this:

See anything odd? Yes, I show whitespace characters in my editor (ColdFusion Builder). Pretty easy to do. Just go to your preferences and change it: go to Window | Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editors, and select Show whitespace characters. What you see in this picture are tabs, spaces, and End of Line markers. "OK, so what?" Well, here's where it gets strange. Let's take our original query, and put it all on a single line:

If you run this, all is well:

As you can see, everything works fine now. But, when I format my SQL for readability again, I again get the error. When I went back, and looked at examples that worked (in my editor) I discovered that lines following lines with params were directly preceded with one or more spaces. So, just to test, I added a single space right before those lines that followed lines referencing params:

This took care of it. My error went away, and my query executed properly, and my query was still formatted for readability. After another round of the great Tabs vs Spaces debate at work I had to change my editor's default preferences back, which is what caused/highlighted this issue. (I told you guys we needed to stick with 4 spaces ;) Maybe it's a bug in the SQL parser, or there's a method to the madness, but adding that single space before those lines is all that's required to get back on track.

This entry was posted on November 14, 2011 at 5:26 PM and has received 901 views. There are currently 5 comments. Print this entry.

Adobe has released the ColdFusion 9.0.1 Hotfix 2, available on the update page. This is a cumulative hotfix, containing fixes for security issues, items around ORM, resolution to questions of JSON serialization, integration bits for Exchange, and much more.

Install has some quirks. It's not just a simple 'upload the file' bit, so you'll want to pay careful attention to the instructions, and backup affected files in advance. This will get so much easier with the next version of ColdFusion, but for now it's worthwhile to jump through the hoops. It is a 'cumulative' hotfix, and word from those in the know say that it is safe to skip over the CHF 1 install, if you haven't done it already, as all it's changes are within this hotfix as advertised.

This entry was posted on November 3, 2011 at 8:31 AM and has received 1140 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Yesterday, Adobe released their second cumulative hotfix for their popular ColdFusion web application server platform.

Cumulative Hotfix 2 is the result of thousands of hours of review, development, and testing by the ColdFusion engineering team. These guys (and gals) review every bug submission, ask questions and gather feedback from many people within the CF development community, and work hard to address the issues in a timely manner.

Hotfix 2 covers major and minor issues dealing with JSON serialization, ORM relations, Solr indexing, cross-site scripting security, MS Exchange integration, and much much more. See the change list for more information.

A big thanks to the Adobe CF Engineering team for their ongoing, and ever increasing support, or the web's first application server.

This entry was posted on September 17, 2011 at 9:35 AM and has received 1102 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

A great man once told me that "A Day Without Learning Is A Day You're Dead From The Neck Up". I strive to learn something new every day, and this week it's really easy.

Starting today (September 12, 2011), Adobe is hosting Adobe ColdFusion Developer Week. Whether you're a long time ColdFusion developer looking to pick up something new, a Flex developer looking to learn about easy integration, or a complete programming noob looking to get started in web development, there is something for everyone in this weeks list of sessions.

Being involved in several different dev communities, I often hear "ColdFusion is still around?" If you're part of that crowd, you really need to check out some of these sessions, covering everything from the basics, to PDF generation and caching and ORM usage, to server monitoring and mobile development. There's a lot to take in here, and it's all free.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2011 at 8:17 AM and has received 990 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

It's been a very busy year, up til now. Work ramped up in February, contracting me for additional hours for a month and a half straight, after which I've worked on a sting of side projects. This helped me finance a move to Jacksonville, Florida. My new (daytime) job is full-time telecommute, which allows me to put my desk anywhere. Teresa wanted to get back to sunshine and beaches, being tired of the cold and snow of Tennessee winters, and chose Jacksonville for it's location and proximity to family and friends. Jacksonville is a great area, and we nailed a terrific place in Fleming Island. I like it because there's lots of tech (user groups and such), and it's not far from other tech centers (Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta, etc). It doesn't hurt that I can maintain a year around tan or that the beach is a short drive away.

A lot of work has come my way, often tacking an additional 40 to 60 hours a week on top of my normal day job schedule. Often I'll take a project that takes a week or two, then take a few weeks off to spend with the family (and catch up on my reading). I have a list of posts I need to write, due to exposure to some projects I hadn't previously been exposed to. Part of that already started with some exposure to the DataTables JQuery plugin, but I'm also lining up posts for jqGrid, jsTree, and the cfUniForm project. Evernote is filling up with little tidbits. The most difficult piece is coming up with the time to write examples. I'm particular about writing well formed code and documentation, which is why my posts sometimes get spaced out a bit.

One of the things I have discovered, in my exposure to these other projects, is how much I miss working with Ext JS day-to-day. JQuery UI is a good project, but lacks the maturity of Ext JS, and is missing too many key components for writing web applications (Data Stores, Grid, Tree, Menus, Tooltips, etc). My exposure to those other projects was an attempt to fill needs for which Ext JS would have been better suited, while locked into using JQuery UI. The JQuery UI team is working on closing that gap, but there is a lot of catch up necessary to match the breadth and power of Ext JS.

Speaking of Ext JS, Packt Publishing asked me to write the next Ext JS book on my own. While very flattered, I had to carefully weigh what that commitment would mean. Ultimately, I could not justify committing seven and a half months to writing the book with all of the other responsibilities I have right now. I will write a few articles for Packt (as part of my contract on the last book), but feel like I can continue to create blog content that would be more timely (no six month editorial process) and have a greater reach, and do so as my schedule permits without being a burden on my family. Sencha has already announced What to Expect in Ext JS 4.1, and recently put Ext Designer 1.2 in Beta, so there's a lot to talk about here.

Last, but definitely not least, I'm following all the buzz about the upcoming ColdFusion "Zeus". A quick Google Search already brings up a ton of info that Adobe has put out regarding the next version of the ColdFusion server platform, and it looks to once again be a significant release. Some of the big things already mentioned have been the move from JRun to Tomcat, the retirement of Verity in favor of Solr, the upgrade to Axis 2, and the inclusion of closures in CFML. That's just some of what's coming, as Adobe appears to be giving more and more detail during the various conferences through the year (and you never know the whole story until it's released).

This entry was posted on August 13, 2011 at 12:54 PM and has received 2492 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.