Steven Erat's Blog | TalkingTree.com

In yesterday's post about configuration nuances of using a 64-bit webserver and 64-bit JVM with ColdFusion 8 on the 64-bit Sun Solaris OS, Damon Gentry posted a comment that is, frankly, way above my head.

I'm curious about if there are any performance gains by running CF8 with a 64-bit JVM. More specifically, given the CPU architecture differences between Intel/AMD, and Sparc (speed vs. cores), does it make since to stick with Solaris? I know that the Sparc T1 can support 32 cores, albeit at 1.2 GHz, whereas the Intel CPU can support 4 cores @ 3.6GHz. [more]

The short answer is, "I don't know".

64-bit Basics
Ok, so I'm not a computer scientist. I don't even have a computer science degree. However, I do have Google. And Wikipedia. And the rest of the Web. So, I've filtered through a variety of articles and selected the following to help inform me on the topic:

• 64-bit
  Wikipedia
• Frequently Asked Questions About the Java HotSpot VM
  Sun
• Tuning Garbage Collection with the Java 5 JVM
  Sun [see Types of Collectors]
• ColdFusion :: 64-Bit and What It Means To You
  Andrew Powell's Blog
• The 64-Bit Advantage
  PC Magazine

All of these articles are quite long, and I encourage you to read them if this subject interests you. Since I cannot precisely answer Damon's question, I'll try to summarize relevant information that I have gleaned from them about running a Java-based web application on a 64-bit JVM/OS. If you want details about any inferences, you should read the above articles, although I may end up quoting liberally here.

[More]

This entry was posted on August 29, 2007 at 1:47 PM and has received 31244 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.

As a very satisfied owner of Total Training DVD video tutorials on Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Flex, I literally recommend their training to everyone I speak with that might have an interest... really, and half the time I chew their ear off because I won't shut up about how great their tutorials are.

Now they're launching online training as well, in HD and available 24/7. Here's some quotes from their website:

Premium Training Goes Online
Total Training is a pioneer in innovative video-based training for creative design, digital video, and office productivity software programs. Our mission is to deliver premium training to our users enabling them to quickly learn new software applications. Now, for the first time, our award-winning videos are available online.

• Access award-winning training 24/7
• High-quality content produced in HD
• Explore the customized interface

• Customized Controls
• Search Content Within Lessons
• Lesson Progression Tracking
• Ability to Bookmark Lessons

Get the Entire Total Training Online: Adobe Library for FREE!
In celebration of our upcoming Total Training Online release, we're offering this once in a lifetime opportunity. For every purchase of $150* or more, you will receive the Total Training Online Adobe Library absolutely free for 1 year that's over $1,000 worth of DVDs accessible online! View our Adobe Library below.

Hurry! Offer expires June 15, 2007.

---

P.S.

Dear Total Training:

Please add ColdFusion 8 training as a part of your web technology stable of training products.

Thanks!

This entry was posted on June 7, 2007 at 10:26 AM and has received 26601 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

My photo of Concord Main Street Market and Cafe after a snow storm was published in the December 2006 issue of The Writer Magazine. The photo set the mood for an article titled Small towns are in the big leagues of writing, a reference to Concord's notable literary history including former residents of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott. I would add to the list current resident Alan Lightman, author of the former NY Times best seller Einstein's Dreams.

[More]

This entry was posted on January 3, 2007 at 5:50 PM and has received 26921 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

This past October my wife and I had the opportunity to vacation in Zion National Park in southern Utah, following the Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas that month. This was my first time in the Southwest USA, and while I'm not inclined to return to the Las Vegas Strip, I would love the opportunity to spend at least a couple weeks visiting Bryce, Arches, and the Grand Canyon. I've been very satisified with the photos I've taken in Zion over the brief three day immersion, so I anticipate photographing much more from that region.

The Wikipedia article on Zion National Park begins with the following:

Zion National Park is a United States National Park located in the Southwestern United States, near Springdale, Utah. A prominent feature in the 229-square-mile (593 km≤) park is Zion Canyon, 15 miles (24 km) long and up to half a mile (800 m) deep, cut through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River... A total of 289 bird species, 75 mammals (including 19 species of bat), 32 reptiles and numerous plant species inhabit the park...

Human habitation of the area started about 8,000 years ago with small family groups of Native Americans; the semi-nomadic Basketmaker Anasazi (300 CE) stem from one of these groups... The Kolob section was proclaimed a separate Zion National Monument in 1937, but was incorporated into the park in 1956.

The geology of the Zion and Kolob canyons area includes nine formations that together represent 150 million years of mostly Mesozoic-aged sedimentation. At various periods in that time, warm, shallow seas, streams, ponds and lakes, vast deserts and dry near-shore environments covered the area.

We rented a Chrysler Sebring convertible at the Las Vegas airport, and made the trip to Springdale, Utah in just 3 hours. The highway from Vegas to St. George is largely desolate and uninteresting, but as soon as you get past Hurricane the scenery begins a dramatic change. I won't be renting the Sebring again because my eye level was the same height as the visor and the top of the windshield, forcing me to turn my neck and slouch down in the seat in order to get a good view, and even with the top up I couldn't get past the visor's annoyance factor.

[More]

This entry was posted on November 11, 2006 at 3:54 PM and has received 32206 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

If you missed tonight's Online ColdFusion Meetup Group event, you can still catch all the lessons and demos from Rob in the archived Breeze Meeting recording. Rob tailored his AJAX presentation to compare related technologies or libraries including Spry, dojo, Flex, Flash, and more, and provided copious demos and a thorough background.

Ajax for ColdFusion Developers
http://stevenerat.breezecentral.com/p34597793/

Look for new event listings soon. Booked for October we have Charlie Arehart on Fusion-Debug and Adobe's new ColdFusion Evangelist Adam Wayne Lehman on ColdFusion Security Best Practices. I'll be posting those event schedules tomorrow.

This entry was posted on September 13, 2006 at 5:55 PM and has received 27572 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Jeff Tapper is one of the coauthors on an upcoming Adobe Flex 2 book. He recently blogged that the book is not yet available on Amazon.com in the US, only in the UK, but I searched the ISBN and found that Walmart is taking pre-ship orders, so you can get in line for your copy now. Walmart is listing the ship date as around July 31, although when I mentioned this to Jeff today after his great presentation on CF Event Gateways he said that date will probably slip a little. I'd like to point out that the co-authors are all known to be highly knowlegeable in ColdFusion, Flex, and Flash, so this should be a must read for everyone. (Matt Boles taught my the Flex 1.5 class I reviewed here)

Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source
Author: Tapper, Jeff , Author: Talbot, James , Author: Boles, Matt
Publisher: Macromedia Press
Publish date: Jul 31 2006
ISBN: 032142316X
Format: Hardcover , 600 pages

This entry was posted on June 30, 2006 at 12:36 PM and has received 26830 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.

Day one of CFUNITED is winding down, although a networking event is still to come this evening. So far its been a blockbuster event with Flex 2 and ColdFusion MX 7.02 integration taking center stage. The big news you know by now since the blogosphere is saturated with today's highlights, but a short list would include:

• Flex 2 Released: The Flex 2 SDK is FREE and does not require a server backend. Flex 2 can integrate with any HTTP or SOAP-based Webservice back end.
• Flex 2 Data Server Released: FDS provides back end data services over RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) for publish/subscribe messaging with Flash/Flex frontend GUIs. There is even a free version of FDS available for use on a single CPU.
• ColdFusion MX 7.02 Released: ColdFusion is a preferred back end data provider and gateway for Flex 2 front ends
• Flex Builder 2 Released: Based on Eclipse, Flex Builder has code generation wizards, visual development, and debugging
• Jason Delmore, the new ColdFusion Product Manager shared a peek at a couple ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) features at the alpha stage including CFPDFFORM to generate PDF forms with pre-filled information, and the ability to extract information from PDFs, and also dynamically generated Breeze presentations from ColdFusion with CFPRESENTATION.
• He's Baaa...aaack: Tim Buntel returns to Adobe as Senior Marking Product Manager for ColdFusion

I've had a chance to connect with many of the ColdFusion bloggers again, including Ray Camden, Rob Brooks-Bilson, Mark Drew, Andy Alan, Simeon Bateman, Joe Rinehart, Jeff Coughlin, and Sandy Clark. Mark Drew spent a great deal of time at the Adobe booth explaining the current and future plans for CFEclipse, and he introduced me to a feature that's been in the plugin for a while already, the FTP file browser. Mark also said that he's been running Flex Builder 2 (beta) plugin on Eclipse 3.2, a surprise to me because the System Requirements refer only to support for 3.1.

[More]

This entry was posted on June 28, 2006 at 2:07 PM and has received 28241 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Since the local news channels have evolved into pure entertainment (are you listening WHDH?), provide no real news value, and do not exhibit much journalistic integrity in my opinion, my viewing preferences have changed such that one of my primary sources for in-depth information about global politics, technology, and economics is now the Charlie Rose show.

Among the guest list, Pulitizer Prize winner Thomas Friedman makes frequent appearances, a favorite of mine. In the May 22, 2006 show, a forward thinking converstation about "Geo Green" or "Green Energy", flex fuels (E85), and the dominance of China and India as world leaders is catalzyed by a quote from George Bush, "America is addicted to oil".

[More]

This entry was posted on May 26, 2006 at 8:54 PM and has received 26244 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

The ColdFusion documentation for CFMX 7 installation on BEA WebLogic J2EE server omits instructions to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable in the startWebLogic.sh script. In contrast, the documentation for CFMX 6.1 instructs the user to set this variable to enable Verity support.

Perhaps because CFMX 7 uses the Verity K2 server mode exclusively rather than the Verity VDK mode, this library path option may have been dropped from the documentation becuase it is no longer needed for Verity support.

[More]

This entry was posted on May 25, 2006 at 12:46 PM and has received 26942 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

The combined meeting of the Boston CFUG and the Online CFUG was a fantastic success due to the brilliant demonstration of FarCry CMS from Daemon, presented by Breeze UberGuru Geoff Bowers.

FarCry CMS is Daemon's flagship offering, an intuitive and extensible Content Management System that puts "controlled power" into the hands of the people who own your site content. FarCry is a cutting edge ColdFusion MX application framework for web based content management that blends the very best of open source development with commercial backing and support.

In Boston there were approximately 16 local members attending at the Adobe office, and 55 online members from Norway to Hawaii and then some. The newly announced ColdFusion Product Manager, Jason Delmore, was generous to stop by to introduce himself to the group and stay around for the event.

[More]

This entry was posted on May 24, 2006 at 5:17 PM and has received 28181 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.