If you can get through the pop-ups and a FireFox crash or two, there's an announcement from SYS-CON that the ColdFusion Developer's Journal (CFDJ) will be discontinued in favor of (get this) the SilverLight Developer's Journal.
http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/426141.htm
Several people have blogged about this, and I happen to agree with their sentiments about the operation.
I was working on a CF8 project (using the Linux version) recently and noticed that now() was returning the wrong time. It was off by an hour. While I appreciated the extra hour's sleep, I decided to hunt for the solution. I finally found the workaround for this continuing bug at phusor.com.
1. Open {coldfusion8}/runtime/bin/jvm.config with a text editor.
2. Find the entry around line 18 that has a comment: "# Arguments to VM".
3. Add a new agrument to the beginning of the java.args parameter which defines the timezone. For example:
4. Re-start CF and the problem should be resolved.
Thanks, TJ!
I was a bit confused when I first tried to create a Flex project that used ColdFusion's built-in version of LiveCycle Data Services. In the old days, setting up an FDS project meant creating a new folder under an existing context, such as /flex, which was located under /jrun4/servers/default/flex. I started looking for the "root" of the LCDS server within my ColdFusion installation and assumed that there was some secret undocumented location.
After some playing, I found that, amazingly, I could just use ColdFusion's web root (wwwroot) when setting up the Flex project!
Here's the step-by-step (if you promise not to ask what OS I'm running Flex Builder on;)
Well, I was finally able to download the latest ColdFusion (see previous post). I installed under Linux (Kubuntu) and the installation was flawless.
I don't do a lot of HTML-based work anymore, so the highly-touted AJAX integration isn't on my radar in the near future. Same with the PDF improvements; I'm sure I'll be using them some day on a Flex project. Same deal with cfimage.
Being a fan of the old Flex Data Services product, I elected to install LiveCycle Data Services ES.
It took a bit of tinkering, but by far the coolest thing for me was the ability to have Flex and ColdFusion applications converse via the Data Services Messaging Gateway. And with LiveCycle Data Services installed as part of ColdFusion you can do something that was very tricky before: run both .cfm and .mxml files within the same context. Works great under the local webserver (port 8500); I hope it works as well using a web connector to Apache.
This opens up a whole new way to deploy applications that may have HTML/CF and Flex components. For example, I've built systems that have HTML entry pages, but then launch a Flex application running under FDS... and they were always a huge pain to deploy. Now we'll be able to install CF with LCDS-ES and simply deploy the files in whatever directory structure makes sense.
On the downside, I could not get the ColdFusion 8 Extensions for Eclipse installed under Linux.
UPDATE: When installing the extensions, you must de-select the checkbox "Ignore features not applicable to this environment"
Anyone else having trouble downloading the new ColdFusion 8? I've tried on Linux and Windows XP, IE, Firefox and Opera. No joy.
I'm dying to give the new features a try, especially the Flex and FMS integration.
UPDATE: I could only get the download to start if I created a new user account.
This one threw me for a loop. I'm documenting it here so I'll remember the next time it happens.
I was working on the TorontoFlex user group application, which is ColdFusion-based. The application is architected as follows:
The main file is index.mxml, so when I compile, I get index.swf and index.html (and other files), which I deploy to our ISP. I tend to manually build projects in Flex Builder so that I don't have to wait on every save. At one point I did a "Build-all". All of a sudden, the index.swf and index.html were gone! Also missing were the supporting files, history.htm, etc.
The problem? I had an error in my code, and had the Problems tab set to only show errors in the current file. Before I realized this, I tried compiling on the command line, where I saw the syntax error I had introduced. As soon as I fixed the error and re-compiled, the files magically re-appeared.
Admittedly, the problem was my fault, but deleting files?! I haven't tested this under Flex Builder 3 beta, but I hope it's dealt with a little more gracefully.
Here's an article I wrote a while back for ColdFusion developers. It's a short introduction to Flex. Some ColdFusion developers (myself included, a couple of years ago) find it difficult to adopt the object oriented, event-driven model of Flex/Actionscript development. Hopefully this article will inspire some of you to give Flex a look.
This just in... ColdFusion 8 is available on Adobe Labs for public beta testing. Let me know what you think are the best new features.
Enjoy!
Some of you may have noticed that there's a new product on labs.adobe.com called LiveCycle Data Services 2.5. Formerly known as Flex Data Services, the new moniker denotes the push by Adobe to get developers to see the potential for integration between their products.
Never heard of LiveCycle? You're not alone. Most developers familiar with Adobe's products know little about this emerging product line. In a nutshell, LiveCycle is a set of enterprise server-side products which facilitate business processes and workflows for medium and large organizations. LCDS is not the full LiveCycle server, but a smaller distribution containing a subset LiveCycle's functionality. Why should you, a Flex or ColdFusion developer, care? Because the front end to these services can be PDF files (traditional LiveCycle), HTML or, you guessed it, Flex & Apollo.
So LiveCycle Data Services will continue to offer all the features of FDS, but also include additional gems such as PDF generation on the server side.
If you're interested in digging a bit deeper into LiveCycle, a preview of the latest release, called LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 8, is available at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/espreview/.
There's a lot of new stuff to learn between these two products. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them for you here or in a separate post.
Ben Forta has an excellent retort to Mary Brandel's idiotic statement that ColdFusion is on the list of The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills.
I know many developers who are making a good living using ColdFusion and many organizations that would not consider using anything else.
Unlike some of the other technologies mentioned in the article, ColdFusion's future is secure. If you're not convinced, Google around for some of the new features being developed for version 8 (Scorpio). There's a huge effort being put forth by Adobe to make this the "best release ever".
