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Two problems with configuring ColdFusion 8.01 on Mac OS X for startup on system boot when using the the utility {cf_root}/bin/cf-init.sh. The first issue is that cf-init.sh cannot be used again to configure CF for startup on boot after the cf-init.sh script is used to unconfigure the service. The second issue is that for Multiserver configuration the script cf-init.sh cannot be used to unconfigure CF as a startup service and the items under /Library/StartupItems/ColdFusion8Multi must be removed manually. The ColdFusion Engineering team is actively seeking to correct these issues, but I'm posting for your convenience in case you run into this beforehand.

Issue 1 logged as ColdFusion bug 73548
On Mac, running cf-init.sh to install system startup script cannot be done a second time after running cf-init.sh uninstall.

The cf-init.sh function install_mac() permanently moves the file {cf_root}/bin/cf-standalone-startup to /Library/StartupItems/ under the new name ColdFusion8 as shown here:

Then the uninstall_mac() function in cf-init.sh permanently removes that file ColdFusion8 as shown here:



There are no longer any copies of {cf_root}/bin/cf-standalone-startup under any name on the system, so another attempt to configure ColdFusion to start on System Boot cannot be performed.

More details:

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This entry was posted on November 6, 2008 at 6:53 AM and has received 27919 views. There are currently 5 comments. Print this entry.

Earlier this year the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) announced finalists in the 2008 Codie awards. The SIIA describes itself as "the principal trade association for the software and digital content industry."

Yesterday the winners were announced. As a contributing member of the Adobe ColdFusion 8 QA team, I'm especially proud that ColdFusion 8 won for Best Web Services Solution, a category described as:

Best Web Services Solution
Awards the solution that best connects disparate applications and data across an enterprise or between enterprises using web services standards such as SOAP, XML and WDSL. Includes Web services enabling technologies, infrastructure, middleware, system integration tools, etc.

In addition to comprehensive, across the board regression testing, the specific CF8 features I worked on include testing support for all new RDBMS versions, integrating new JDBC driver versions, LiveCycle Data Services Integration, and CFReport HTML support. I also performed installation testing across J2EE servers such as WebLogic, WebSphere, and JBoss while emphasizing the Linux OS. Currently I'm working on SOAP-based Web Service testing in Flex. Speaking of Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 won the Codie award for the Best Open Source Solution.

More information about the SIIA 2008 Codie Awards can be found at InfoWorld

This entry was posted on May 21, 2008 at 6:00 AM and has received 27336 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

The ColdFusion 8.01 System Requirements as shown in the detailed platform support matrix [PDF] indicates that support for 64-bit Linux distributions is limited to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 10.1. This fine print appears to often go overlooked, so I just want to broadcast it a little louder here.

I was contacted today by someone reporting installation problems and mentioned glibc and floating point errors. A bit of Googling turned up this Google Group thread and this blog entry. Apparently, glibc 2.5 is required for the 64-bit binaries used in the ColdFusion 8.01 64-bit server, so RHEL4's glibc 2.4 just won't do.

On a related note, the ColdFusion Installation Support page currently has a broken link to receive free installation support by email. I notified the web team about the broken link, and I found that the new way to enter this type of installation support request is by registering your product and completing a form here.

This entry was posted on May 5, 2008 at 10:22 AM and has received 27643 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

The B.U. Center for Digital Imaging Arts has just added another core curriculum to their stable of information technology certificates by introducing the Web Development Certificate. As you may know, they completely won me over with their Digital Photography program, and one of my coworkers at Adobe has been raving about their Audio Production curriculum as well. As such, I have high expectations that they will deliver great instructors for the chosen curriculum.

Their Web Development certificate program, founded on more than 20 courses, emphasizes the use of PHP and MySQL as core technologies, including a Rich Media Web Development subtopic focusing on the use of Flash and ActionScript. Along the way there's a sprinkling of Javascript, XML related technologies, and AJAX, and the course is capped off with some Content Management and Web 2.0 social network topics.

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This entry was posted on March 18, 2008 at 11:56 AM and has received 28021 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Jessamyn, a Flickr contact and the daughter of one of my friends at my photo club, recently posted a great video on YouTube about installing Ubuntu Linux. As a Librarian in Vermont, she was tasked with repurposing several computers donated to the library, each of which had a potentially unlicensed copy of Windows installed on it. Watch Jessamyn wipe the Windows off the computers, install Ubuntu Linux, and show how great Linux really is. She captured the whole procedure in this short and humorous video.

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This entry was posted on September 19, 2007 at 3:35 AM and has received 27121 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

In the August 2007 edition of Linux Magazine, the editor contributes an article about the usefulness of integrating PHP with the free Flex SDK to achieve a Rich Internet Application (RIA) in a Web 2.0 world.

Flex and PHP
by Martin Streicher
Linux Magazine (full article available online with free registration)

The author begins by a short comparison of the RIA technologies of AJAX vs. Flex, and goes on to suggest that while AJAX is touted as an alternative to Flex UI's, AJAX suffers from a lack of rich media integration such as video, music, or animations and carries the risk of varying JavaScript behavior across different browser implementations.

The article does a great job describing architectural differences between classic web applications and RIAs. In a multi-tiered Rich Internet Application the application server technology such as PHP, or better yet ColdFusion, acts as the controller to implement business logic and interacts with deeper service layers that interface with the database. However, on the client side, Flex runs in the browser to perform data input validation, displays data visually via drill-down charts and graphs or via paginated data grids, and provides real time updates to changes in data (via Live Cycle Data Services a.k.a. Flex Data Services).

Furthermore, Flex provides a smart looking user interface and seamless user experience akin to typical desktop software while lacking the notoriously painful white screens of death during page refreshes that are commonplace in the Web 1.0 world. In effect, more work is done in the browser as a means of distributed computing, leaving the application server to focus on business logic and freeing it from having to generate the UI again and again across requests.

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This entry was posted on September 7, 2007 at 11:40 AM and has received 27142 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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.

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This entry was posted on August 29, 2007 at 1:47 PM and has received 30982 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.

Recently I tried to purchase the Japanese version of TurboLinux Server 10 but in the process ran into nothing but dead ends. TurboLinux is reported to be the most popular distribution in Asia and is based in Japan. Although their primary website is in Japanese at http://www.turbolinux.co.jp, they do have an English version available through a US website http://www.turbolinux.com.

The US website offers only English versions of TurboLinux, and their online store is simply a redirect to their US distributor BlueSquad. Additionally, Distrowatch indicates that the distributor Source One Network is leading vendor.

Finding that neither BlueSquad nor Source One offered the Japanese version of the product either online or by direct contact with their Sales, I decided to just call the mothership itself. That was a futile effort since the phone number listed for their US office in San Francisco is completely wrong. Three times I called to verify the number while pissing off who ever was picking up each time.

Great, so their phone number is misprinted. What next? Well, I sent a fax to their fax number requesting a call back, and I submitted their online feedback form. Twenty four hours later and no response from either.

What really irks me is that the US TurboLinux office is at 600 Townsend St and the Adobe (former Macromedia) office is 601 Townsend St. directly across the street!! But here I am in the Adobe office in Newton, MA and unless I could coerce a colleague in San Fran to take a short stroll I was out of luck.

Almost... My last resort was to co-opt my Japanese collegue down the hall to navigate the Japanese TurboLinux Website. With his help, we were able to successfully make a purchase after much wheel-spinning and wasted time.

This entry was posted on March 15, 2007 at 1:09 PM and has received 26491 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5). The Server editions have changed from the AS or ES choices to RHEL or RHEL AP (Advanced Platform). Basic subscriptions for RHEL cost $349 whereas RHEL AP starts at $1499. RHEL now includes virtualization for running up to 4 guest OSes, and RHEL AP can run unlimited guest OSes (well, as much as your hardware can manage).

The Desktop edition Basic Subscription starts at $80, but there are several other Desktop configurations that include Multi-OS virtualization and Workstation ranging up to $339.

The free Red Hat clone CentOS released CentOS 5 Beta earlier this week, and they're expected to post the final version shortly.

This entry was posted on March 14, 2007 at 1:07 PM and has received 26520 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.

There's been a lot of talk about how to run ColdFusion MX 7 on Ubuntu Linux, but I haven't seen much about running CFMX on Fedora Core 6 Linux. While both are officially unsupported for use with ColdFusion by Adobe, as a hobbyist you might enjoy working with these or other distributions, as I do. Ubuntu is based on source from Debian Linux, while Fedora Core is based on Red Hat source, and in fact Fedora distros are effectively public betas used towards the development of future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. According to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is by far the most popular distro out there, for now, while Fedora pulls in at #3.

The problems regarding the installation and configuration of ColdFusion on each distribution are both overlapping and yet distinct, especially where Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is involved (Fedora). FC6 intends to make SELinux security policy administration easier via a graphical troubleshooting tool. (While I was able to install and use setroubleshoot, I was not able to get the sealert client GUI to work, but it does have commandline operations that were helpful... somewhat. See below.)

Here I identify and address 5 problems in order to run ColdFusion on FC6, leaving one problem with SELinux unresolved but with a workaround. Some of these problems and their solutions have been blogged about before, but I found new twists to them in FC6.

I decided to address the issues of Fedora Core because Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is currently in Beta 2 and is largely based on Fedora, and I hope to be ahead of the curve by the time RHEL5 is released. Since ColdFusion 4.01 in 1998, ColdFusion releases have supported current Red Hat releases.

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This entry was posted on December 6, 2006 at 12:26 PM and has received 35736 views. There are currently 10 comments. Print this entry.