Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

Tonight I am off to Olympia 2 for the Adobe Round Table (I sound like a knight!) on the future of the internet as an applications platform. Should be interesting, and its a nice diversion from a normal UK CFUG presentation. Nothwistanding I shall be presenting ColdSpring next week a the UK CFUG.

Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Ray Camden, Spike Milligan in the house. Joe Rinehart, Doug Hughes, Simeon Bateman, Rob Rohan, Ollie Tupman in the house.
Jared Rypka-Hauer, Nathan Strutz,  Mike Nimer, Tim Buntel is out the house. 

Just a little sing song for all the people who have helped and taught me things about ColdFusion and CFEclipse along the way.

THANK YOU!
(Check out the song on )

Notice I didnt say CFEclipse? Anyway, in the latest round of plugins that Adobe has released, with the new CF/Flex Super Wizard they have also included the ColdFusion documentation under the help menu. This is great news for all you developers.

One strange thing I should point out. All these plugins which are labeled under "Flex" are actually very good Coldfusion plugins, the RDS data viewer (unless you are on a Mac, where you are stuffed if you want the Query Builder tool), the RDS File explorer, the RDS -> DAO/Active Rectod wizard and now the ColdFusion documentation. They are all branded under the labs as Flex and you have to click on the "Download Flex Builder" before you get to them. They are very handy even if you dont even touch Flex (like me)

I am now not sure what to do with the inline help for CFEclipse. If all the developers are using Flex Builder, and using all the CF extension/plugins then all is fine. If not, then we would have to deploy the CFHelp docs and add our own extension to go to the right help item. So you could then have two versions of the documentation, which is mad.

Adobe seem to be doing very well adding features to Flex (which are really very useful CF Features too). Now not sure if I should continue doing work on CFE, and just let them do it all.

Ok, so its a bit of an alarmist headline, but I went through a whole procedure of installing CFMX to run on JRun and THAT runs (see my previous post) which is fair enough, but I dont like the following:

• putting all my sites in /Applications/JRun4/servers/default/cfusion, where I cant run PHP and other websites (I feel its untidy but that is just me)
• having the context as /cfusion and the url on a port like: http://localhost:8100/cfusion/
• having to start JRun manually.

Ok, so lets go through these and fix each one, and this is why the title of the post, to kill the first two I thought that I could manually deploy the wsconfig, since I was getting errors and the gui version didnt see my apache webserver: Then I tried the console version of wsconfig
Ok, so if it is just getting errors, lets do it manually as defined by this document over at macromedia

I wont detail how I did this as the document describes how to manually do all of this, and then I come to the last part, which is where you get the mod_jrun.so from the expanded wsconfig.jar, the options didnt have what I was looking for:



So, being the person I am, I tried them all and got the following error each time:

So that is where I am at. If I could get the source to mod_jrun.so and recompile it under my MacBook Pro it might work. I tried the intel, but that didnt work, I tried the linux and the mac versions still with no use. If anybody has any ideas, let me know!

EDIT: Simeon Bateman pointed me to this article on rebuilding the mod_jrun.so! so I shall be giving this a go tonight to see if I can get it all working smoothly!

Finally, all sorted, I am off to CFUnited on the 27th of June. I have the flights booked, the hotel in Washington DC (well Rockville) booked and my tickets all sorted out. I cant wait! I shall also be taking this opportunity to have myself a little holiday in San Francisco too, so after the conference we are flying out to San Francisco for a week (just in time for the 4th of July).

We are staying at the Ramada Inn, not sure if it is miles away from the conference but at least we got a room to suit our special dietary requirements, mainly that my partner and I are both rabid smokers...  (the flights are going to be interesting... white knuckle rides I am sure!)

Now if anybody has some groovy ideas for things to do in Washington (ok ok.. Rockville?) and/or San Francisco... please let me know!

If you have just got your clammy hands on the RDS plugin and installed it onto your Eclipse then got an error when you opened up a Quiery View, click on the details and if you see something like

"at org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.ui....."

it means you have myEclipse installed and it is clashing with the RDS plugin.  So you can disable (just momentarily I am sure) the myEclipse plugin by going to

Help -> Software Update -> Manage Configuration

There look for the myeclipse plugin and select it and click the disable link on the details.

Hope that helps

Finally they have released the RDS plugin for Eclipse. This is a great contribution from Macromedia Adobe to the community. I dont know if they will charge for it but it finally gives a GREAT feature back to the community for people using CFEclipse. The nice thing about the RDS plugin is that it allows you to browse datasources on registered Coldfusion services and (on windows only) use a familiar homesite style Query Builder. I have been using the RDS plugin for a while now and its fast, damn fast! And unlike other database plugins for Eclipse its very easy for the CF'er to set it up, since you dont need to add jdbc connection strings or driver classes.

The other feature of the RDS plugin is that you can browse the filesytem on an RDS server and edit the files (and if they are CFM files) in CFEclipse. A great combination!

Along side the RDS plugin there are some great wizards that allow you to create some DAO and Beans for each of the tables. Or you can choose to create an active record CFC. Its pretty damn awesome stuff if I may say so and it just shows how you can use CFEclipse + adobe plugins together in Eclipse as your single IDE of choice. (ok ok.. apart from the design part)

And yes... it all comes under the banner of Flex for some reason... but I guess that is just because you can also create Flex AS objects for your database tables.

A small warning though, I noticed that the RDS plugin doesnt seem to play nicely with the myEclipse plugin, I need to check iinto this issue more as to why that is and workarounds.

I shall be presenting tonight at the UK CFUG, and showing all the new features in CFEclipse that we have been developing over the last couple of months.

I shall also be presenting something pretty exciting, the RDS plugin for Eclipse by Adobe. This is a great place to preview the plugin since it is still in alpha stage but looking very good so far!

We will be trying to record the audo tonight so that we can put together a nice presentation for you later on if you are unable to attend (whats your excuse??.. ok ok.. wrong country!)

You can register for the event here: http://www.ukcfug.org