CFWebtools is Growing, We Need More ColdFusion People

Just a very quick note to the ColdFusion Community, CFWebtools is looking to hire a few more Senior Level ColdFusion developers. We also have the need for people with Flex and Air skills.

CFWebtools is location in Omaha, NE, but we have a large number of remote employees and contractors. If you are interested,read the job posting at the link above and contact us.

ColdFusion 9.0.1 Cumulative Hot fix 2 on OS X Lion

The Adobe ColdFusion team have released: ColdFusion 9.0.1 : Cumulative Hot fix 2. The this link http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/918/cpsid_91836.html. One of the items that caught my attention is the bug forx for OS X Lion.

Bug # 86992 ColdFusion multiserver instance does not start properly on Mac OS X Lion (10.7.x).

I downloaded the Hot Fix and started the whole process from scratch. I had already blown away my ColdFusion 9 from my MacBook Pro which has OS X Lion to I could try another version of ColdFusion.

  1. clean up my system
  2. Install ColdFusion 9.0 in multi server mode
  3. Test real quick - yes 9.0 is running (it always did)
  4. Install ColdFusion 9.0.1 in Multi-server mode
  5. Test real quick, no it won't even start (which is also normal)
  6. Install ColdFusion 9.0.1 Cumulative Hot fix 2
  7. Test real quick and yes it runs.
However, one bug still remains that I can see. The ColdFusion Admin Settings Summary and Info pages DO NOT LOAD.

I've done a reboot a couple of times now and still no luck. But at least ColdFusion 9.0.1 Multi Server is running on OSX Lion.

Fully Operational SVN and Task Tracking and Publishing System

The CF Webtools tag line is "You Dream it We Build it", including SVN servers.

Keeping it in house
CF Webtools has been using it's own task and project tracking system for years. Over this time it's grown. It keeps track of clients, hours of dev work, hours paid by clients, projects, project tracks/tasks and a lot more. It does what CF Webtools needs and it will be expanding as more needs come up. But it does not integrate with anything (or it didn't used to). We also run our own SVN server as well as numerous development and staging servers. All needed to maintain the clients dev/staging sites for ongoing work.

Mark Kruger, aka. ColdFusion Muse believes in keeping these services in house as much as possible. I know people will argue the cost of do it yourself, verses someone hosting it for you. But, there are other reasons being considered as well. We're keeping it in house. However, it finally came to a point where we needed a better SVN system and some integration.

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GoDaddy Discontinues ColdFusion Hosting

The news hitting the "Twitterverse" as I type this short blog post is that GoDaddy has just sent out emails to their ColdFusion hosting customers informing them that GoDaddy is going to discontinue ColdFusion hosting in 3 months.

"After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue support for ColdFusion®. The product will officially remain available to Go Daddy customers for three months, until November 29, 2011. After that date, ColdFusion websites hosted by Go Daddy will not work.

We will not be removing customer content from the system -- your files will remain safely in our hosting datacenter. Because your current hosting account offers additional languages (PHP on Linux and Windows plans, and .NET on Windows plans), we hope you will find an alternative to your current ColdFusion implementation. Additionally, Deluxe and Ultimate plans offer Ruby, Perl and Python as language options.

Should you decide to move your files, please review the following help articles: Moving Directories Using the FTP File Manager and Using the File Manager to Move Files Between Directories.

If you have further questions or concerns, contact our customer service department at 480-505-8877.

Thanks for being a Go Daddy customer.

Bob Parsons
CEO and Founder
GoDaddy.com

No matter what your or my opinion(s) are of GoDaddy and their ColdFusion hosting business, the facts are people need to move to a new host fast.

There are other ColdFusion Hosting companies. Adobe has a page listing their ColdFusion Hosting Partners. These are the ones I know of off hand.

While working with CF Webtools, I have the opportunity to work with Edgeweb hosting a lot. These guys are awesome. They support, and I mean SUPPORT, their clients. I do recommend Edgeweb based on my experience with them.

Also, if you are looking for high quality ColdFusion programming and hosting I will shamelessly plug Mark Kruger, a.k.a. ColdFusion Muse, and his team at CF Webtools, which includes me. ;-)

this was an unsolicited message

Update: I removed one company due to the number of complaints I've heard.

How I Started in ColdFusion

I missed the official August 1st celebration, but then if you read the "About" section you'll get a glimpse of how I started with ColdFusion.

I've been a geek since I was a little kid. I had home electronics kits and built all sorts of things like crystal radios, buzzers, door bells, simple switching circuits etc. I also am cursed with "The Knack"

I got my hands on my first computer around 1982,it was a TI-99/4A.

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PostgreSQL and MySQL on OS X Lion

Just a quick note to report that both my PostgreSQL 8.3.7 and MySQL 5.1.4 installs survived the upgrade to OS X Lion. PostgreSQL was installed via Mac Ports and MySQL was installed via the download from their website. PG Admin and MySQL workbench are also working just fine.

ColdFusion 9 on OS X Lion

The Lion Shipped Last Night, or this morning. Today we'll see if it Roars! I am downloading and installing OS X Lion on my older Mac Book Pro. I have ColdFusion 9 Developer edition as well as the rest of my developer tools on there. I plan to use the MBP as the guinea pig and if that works fine then to my main system, a much newer iMac. I'll update this post with details as I have them.

The Install Process

FIRST RUN YOUR SOFTWARE UPDATES! New updates came out for Snow Leopard in the past few days including and update to the Migration Assistant. Next, go the the App store. Lion if featured on the home page. Purchase Lion for $29 and wait while it downloads and installs. This is what's happening right now on the MBP. I hope everyone has a fast internet connection. This is 3.49GB.

The Results

So far I am running into an issue getting CF 9 server started. I don't have time right now to debug.

ColdFusion Builder 2 is running. This was installed already when I did the updated to Lion.

Flash Builder 4.5 is hanged in the install process. I hadn't installed it yet and it seems to be not working. The first issues was it could not communicate with Adobe to verify my Adobe ID. I don't have time to debug this either right now.

*UPDATE*
JRun is running, but I can't control starting or stopping of ColdFusion from CFBuilder or the ColdFusion Launcher. If I kill JRun then use the ColdFusion Launcher, I get the message "Server 'cfusion' failed to start." I'm not seeing anything in the logs indicating why it failed. I'm wondering if the connector to Apache is an issue. I remember that I had to redo that for ColdFusion 8 when I upgraded to Snow Leopard. Otherwise I'll reinstall ColdFusion 9 and see what happens.

  • Flash Builder 4.5 did install finally
  • ColdFusion Builder 2 is running.

*UPDATE 2*
There had to be something else wrong with my previous install. maybe I had the wrong connector or installed previously. I am not sure. This is a 3+ year old MacBook Pro that had Leopard installed originally and has had two OS upgrades since. None of these upgrades have been fresh clean installs. Plus ColdFusion 8 prior and now ColdFusion 9. So, I decided to uninstall ColdFusion and reinstall. That only took 5 minutes and now ColdFusion 9 is up and running. The good news about doing this way is we now know the installer works on Lion. Maybe this weekend I'll upgrade my iMac which is much newer and has not had so many previous upgrades. I'm feeling better about OS X Lion now.

*UPDATE 3*
Well, I tried to install the ColdFusion 9.0.1 update. That failed. I'm having all the same issues I had when I originally upgraded to OS X Lion. I usually stay up-to-date on these updates and hot fixes so I'm guess this may have been the issue all along. I'm posting the items from log files that may point to a clue. I'm not sure what the problem is at the moment.

view plain print about
1Apache error.log
2[Fri Jul 22 12:01:47 2011] [notice] jrApache[136: 59841] Couldn't initialize from remote server, JRun server(s) probably down.
3[Fri Jul 22 12:01:47 2011] [notice] jrApache[136: 59841] JRun will not accept request. Check JRun web server configuration and JRun mappings on JRun server.
4
5
6cfusion-event.log
707/22 12:02:08 info No JDBC data sources have been configured for this server (see jrun-resources.xml)
807/22 12:02:08 info JRun Web Server listening on *:8300
907/22 12:02:08 info JRun Proxy Server listening on *:51020
1007/22 12:02:08 info Deploying enterprise application "cfusion-ear" from: file:/Applications/JRun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/
1107/22 12:02:08 info Deploying web application "Adobe ColdFusion 9" from: file:/Applications/JRun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/
1207/22 12:02:09 user JSPServlet: init
1307/22 12:02:10 user ColdFusionStartUpServlet: init
1407/22 12:02:10 user ColdFusionStartUpServlet: ColdFusion: Starting application services
1507/22 12:02:10 user ColdFusionStartUpServlet: ColdFusion: VM version = 20.1-b02-383

*UPDATE 4*
A huge thanks to Marcin Szczepanski - see his comment below.

I could confirm his findings on my installation also. The new jpedal.jar is different. There are class files in the old one that are not in the new one. By replacing the new jpedal.jar file with the old one, ColdFusion 9.0.1 is up and running. Considering this was part of the update for 9.0.1 I wonder what else will break because of using the old file?

Another ColdFusion Builder 2 bug fixed

I am just getting fully into code for today with the ColdFusion Builder 2 HotFix 1 applied. I had to edit some JavaScript and I noticed that it appears another bug was fixed that wasn't documented in the HotFix documentation. It used to be that when editing JavaScript files "name.js" that if JavaDoc style comments were used the syntax coloring would break. Now it's working. Can anyone else confirm this?

This had been reported as bug # 2824457 to Adobe back in March of 2011 and attributed as a "third-party" issue.

view plain print about
1/**
2 * File name: myJsFile.js
3 * Date: 07/19/2011
4 *
5 * @param int
6 * This function does something
7 *
8 */

9 function testMeNow(myInt) {
10 if (myint == 0) {
11 alert("Too Small");
12 } else {
13 alert("too big");
14 }
15}

ColdFusion Builder 2 Hotfix 1

Adobe released the ColdFusion Builder 2 HotFix 1 today. Three bugs have been fix related to searching files.

2918913 If you select multiple files in the navigator and perform search, ColdFusion Builder Search scope does not display the option Selected Resources.

2918906 If you select multiple files or folders and perform search, ColdFusion Builder Search does not provide the option to specify file extensions to narrow down the search.

2918920 At times, ColdFusion Builder Search becomes unresponsive if you perform search on large number of files.

Hopefully this is a sign that Adobe will be releasing HotFixes more often than was done with ColdFusion builder 1, because there are still more bugs to be resolved.

ColdFusion Builder 2 and the Subversive Plugin

One of the first things you may need to do after installing ColdFusion Builder (or Flash Builder) in setup SVN. My personal preference is the Subversive Plugin. Prior to importing any projects I recommend installing the Subversive plug in and getting it setup with an SVN connector. Doing this first will make importing any existing previous version CFBuilder projects or existing SVN Checkouts much easier to import and get re-connected.

I am blogging this because the great Ray Camden, the ColdFusionJedi, was tweeting for help today with this subject and the Subversive plugin. This is what we figured out. Not all SVN Connectors are equal, use SVNKit. Below is how to install Subversive and the SVNKit connector and why you should choose this connector.

You need to install the plugin first. On the Standalone version of ColdFusion Builder do the following:

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