Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

 

Munich! City of Oktober fest and Pretzels! The big soft ones with butter inside. What could be more delicious than that? I tell you what is... CFCAMP 2011 is! 

That's right ladies and gentle-folks, after a three year hiatus, there is going to be a stomping and knowledge-infusing conference in Munich this year, filled to the gills with awesome presenters and me! 

For a measly €90  a ticket (going up to €119 in October, so get them whilst they are fresh!), your mind can be blown by the likes of Charlie Arehart (he of the inside secrets into ColdFusion 10!), Luis Majano (he of the mobile knowledge), Gary Gilbert exposing his JQuery to the public, Bilal Soylu will also be locking down your apps, and of course Andy Allan and myself, giving it all from our presenter's pulpit. 

Sure you can't miss this?!

Head over to http://www.cfcamp.org/anmeldung.cfm http://www.cfcamp.org/registration.cfm?ChangeLanguageTo=en to get your tickets (yep, it's in German, just use Chrome and translate it, you are a clever person right? This time in English! Don't say we don't spoil you!)

 

 

If you have ever wondered how your memory is being used in a Railo Server application, why not get the latest development release of Railo Server: 3.3.0.026 rc (you know that you can do this from the server administrator right?).

Just go to http://yourdomain/railo-context/admin/server.cfm and log in, then you can click on the "update" button, set the updates to "Development", update and then click the "execute button below to get the latest update.

Once you have done that, in the Railo Server Administrator screen, you will see info about your installation and scrolling down you will get a nice graphic on how your memory is being used, like the example below:

Yet another handy feature of Railo Server! Nice!

It has been two years today that I have been working at Railo Technologies and it gives me great pleasure to announce that Denny Valliant (@denstar) has just joined the team!

Denny is a great addition as he has been working with various packagers for Railo, and of course, he is the Lead Developer for the CFEclipse project!
How about that for a great combination eh?!
Welcome on board Denny! Hold on tight! It's gonna be a hell of a ride!
Check out the official announcement over that the Railo Blog

I am not sure people out there know this but Railo has four awesome functions that I use all the time, they are :

• getFunctionList
• getTagList
• getFunctionData
• getTagData

 

getFunctionList* and getTagList
These two functions will return a structure with all the functions or tags that are currently installed on the Railo server. For example, getFunctionList will return:

And getTagList will return:

getTagData and getFunctionData
Of course, this information in itself isn't amazing, since how do you know the arguments for each? This is where the getTagData and getFunctionData come in useful. For Example, if you want to get all the properties of say, the function ImageFilter (I created the FilterExplorer using this function), all you have to do is:

And you will get a nice struct with all the info:

The function getTagData is slightly different, in that you have to split out the namespace when calling it, so you have to call it as follows:

Which gets you all the attributes and documentation for the tag:

 

Simply using those tags, I have started a little project using CloudBees, ColdBox and of course Railo, that I shall show off a bit later.

* getFunctionList is also available in CF9

A while ago I was playing with the Stax.net deployment system, since then they have been bought by CloudBees, a Platform as a Service for Java Web Apps and I wanted to see how easy it was to run Railo on it.

One of the advantages of running Railo in CloudBees (apart from scaling and versioning) is the ability to deploy incremental changes, rather than having to deploy the whole WAR as you have to do with AWS's BeanStalk. In this post I shall go through how to get a sample application running.

Requirements
Before we get started we need to do the following:

• Sign up for an account at CloudBees: https://grandcentral.cloudbees.com/account/signup
• Download the CloudBees SDK and install it: https://cloudbees.zendesk.com/entries/414109-cloudbees-sdk
• Download Railo as a WAR: http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/download/

Once you have setup the CloudBees SDK as they have mentioned, you need to setup your API and Secret Keys, to do this you can go get your keys from your account page, and add them to the file that should have been created (if you are using OSX or a Linux OS ) in:

~/.bees/bees.conifg

Now that we have all that installed, let's go create a simple app through the CloudBees web interface, I have named my application "railo" (surprise, surprise!).
Once it has been created, click on the configure button so that you can get the ID of the application, in my case it is "markdrew/railo".

Now we have that application, we can go and download it, go to the folder you want to download the application to in the command line/terminal and type the following:

> mkdir markdrew_railo
> cd markdrew_railo
> bees getapp -a markdrew/railo

That was easy, if you setup your API and Secret keys you should get some XML and some other commands appearing and it should all be downloaded. Let's run it before adding Railo to the mix:

> bees run

After a few seconds you can head to http://localhost:8080/ and get something that looks like the following:

Now to add Railo to our application. You can stop the application by pressing Ctrl + C, and then rename the railo-3.2.2.000.war to railo-3.2.2.000.zip and uncompress it:

> mv railo-3.2.2.000.war railo-3.2.2.000.zip
> unzip -d railo railo-3.2.2.000.zip

Now that we have unzipped the WAR file into the railo directory we can copy the contents from the railo/ directory to the markdrew_railo/webapp directory.

> cp -r railo/ markdrew_railo/webapp/

To test this, we can run the "bees run" command again and after a while you can test your application at http://localhost:8080/, you should get the Railo start page! Awesome!
Stop the application using Ctrl + C and let's clean out some files that are left over that we don't need:

> rm -r webapp/WEB-INF/classes/
> rm webapp/index.jsp

Now that we have cleaned it up and tested it , let's go ahead and deploy it. This is as simple as typing:

> bees deploy

The upload will take a while since it will upload something like 55Mb as our initial upload. Once this is done you should be able to check out your application live at the url defined in your configuration, mine is: http://railo.markdrew.cloudbees.net/

Let's change the default homepage, so that we can see how much it has to upload next time. Change the contents of index.cfm to just display the current time:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Changed!</title>
</head>
<body id="documentation" class="twoCol">
   <cfoutput>
      #Now()#
   </cfoutput>
</body>
</html>

This time when we run the "bees deploy" command you should see that it has very quickly uploaded the changes and they should be live, without having to re-deploy the whole thing! Awesome! This is a massive advantage over AWS Beanstalk, that where small changes would require of a total re-deploy of your application.

It has been a while since I went to a conference and saw a CFEclipse presentation. In previous years it has been me presenting on this but since Denny has taken over the development and I have joined Railo time has been short to add to the project and therefore present on the topic.

So we are starting a donation fund for Denny to attend http://www.opencfsummit.org/! It will be an amazing conference and I think the missing piece of the puzzle is the current Developer of CFEclipse presenting! So head over to http://cfeclipse.org/index.cfm/blog/dengocon/ and show your support!

Go on, you know it makes sense.

Yesterday, I presented the NoSQL and CouchDB to the UK CFUG. I think it went down well and there were lots of questions and interest in the subject of Not Only SQL and how they can be used with your applications.

As promised, you can download the presentation with links and code samples here

You can also view the presentation over at Slide Six

You can check out the presentation on Adobe Connect: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p93766981/

I have spent a while working on this extension and after a hiatus of client work I managed to get it all uploaded and documented onto the Railo Wiki.

CouchDB is a noSQL database that allows you to store complex documents and get them by key (and revision), it is very performant and easy to replicate which makes it a great alternative as a distributed caching system, hence we created the CouchDB Cache Extension!

It is fairly simple to install, you just have to add the preview extension provider (http://preview.getrailo.org/ExtensionProvider.cfc) to the list of your Railo Extension Providers and then under your Extensions/Applications section you should now see the CouchDB Cache extension, just install that, create a Cache Connection and start using it for your Objects, Templates, Queries etc!

There are more detailed installation instructions over at the Wiki, why not check it out? http://wiki.getrailo.com/wiki/extensions:couchdb

Background: I am writing a little app to help us here at Railo with some of our contacts, nothing over the top or anything and wanted to take Sean Corfield's FW/1 for a spin.

As I am developing, I went the most direct route, I just did some queries in the service layer so my code looks like:

<cffunction name="list" output="false">
	<cfset var clients = 0>
	
	<cfquery name="clients" datasource="#variables.dsn#">
		SELECT * FROM contact;
	</cfquery>
	<cfreturn clients>
</cffunction>


<cffunction name="view" output="false">
	<cfargument name="clientid">
	<cfset var qclient = 0>
	<cfquery name="qclient" datasource="#variables.dsn#">
		SELECT * FROM contact WHERE id = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#arguments.clientid#">;
	</cfquery>
	<cfreturn qclient>
</cffunction>

OK, nothing world shattering, so I wanted to start using the ORM features of Railo (join the pre-release group to test them out!). I changed my code to look like:

<cffunction name="list" output="false">
	<cfset var clients = 0>
	
	<cfquery name="clients" dbtype="orm">
		FROM contact
	</cfquery>
	<cfreturn clients>
</cffunction>


<cffunction name="view" output="false">
	<cfargument name="id">
	<cfreturn entityLoad("contact",arguments.id,true)>
</cffunction>

I then defined my "contact" (I can show the code but it's hardly rocket science) and then when I reloaded I got the error:

Component [contact] has no acessible Member with name [ID]

Of course! My view code looks like:

<input type="hidden" name="id" value="#rc.data.id#">

I could change all my calls to fields to

<input type="hidden" name="id" value="#rc.data.getid()#">

but why bother? I just went to the Railo Admin -> Archives & Resources: Component -> Magic Functions and enabled them, now all my view code works just as expected and I didn't have to change my view code.

 

 

On the final CFUnited, Railo will be there in force!

You can come visit us at our stand to find out the awesome consulting services we provide as well as, of course, our most awesome Open Source CFML Engine! (yes! I used "awesome" twice!)

There might even be some delicious Swiss chocolate there too!

Apart from the stand, you can also check out our team's presentations

Sean Corfield will be talking about:

• ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape
• FW/1 - The Invisible Framework

And you can also catch Gert Franz's topic:

• Railo 4.0 - What's Next?

Since most of us will be en-route to the conference tomorrow, why not email us today if you have any queries ahead of time?

See you all there! I am sure it's going to be awesome!