Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

I am really happy to say that I shall be presenting at cf.Objective (ANZ) this year! I had a great time last year in Melbourne and glad that this year I won't just be manning the Railo stand (do come and say hello!) but I shall also be doing a presentation on CouchDB 

CouchDB is a "noSQL" database that is rather exciting in how it works as well as a highly performant document database.

If you manage to make it, make sure you either come to my session or at least pop by and say hello to the Railo team! 

When you send an email from the <cfmail> tag in Railo, there are times that for whatever reason the email won't be sent. Rather than digging through a bunch of folders to see what hasn't been sent, you can do a couple of things.

You can view all the task spool in the Railo Web Administrator -> Services -> Tasks page by going to http://<your server>/railo-context/admin/web.cfm?action=services.tasks

Or you can programatically get the task spool by doing the following code:

<cfadmin action="getSpoolerTasks" type="web" password="#password#" returnVariable="tasks">

<cfdump var="#tasks#">

You get a query by return that has the type, the item, how many times it has tried and an array of exceptions that have happened, this way you can manually or programatically deal with the errors.

In the first part of this series I looked at creating an extension and an extension provider which suited my needs.

In this post I shall be looking at getting Railo server into your Eclipse project so that you can debug your code. 

So that we can keep it all neat and tidy, I am going to create a project in Eclipse, that will contain the source code for the extension, the extension provider, and Jetty running Railo. 

Why would I put ALL of this in one project you might ask (you might?). I want to be able to debug the server itself, set breakpoints and check variables as I write my code. 

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My role at Railo Technologies has so far been much more of a consultant so far. We consult and develop a number of projects on ACF and Railo and as I am a happy CFML user this has worked out great so far.

One of the things that I wanted to get much more into was the engine itself, and adding features to it. One feature that I am currently working on is creating aCouchDB Cache Extension.

Why CouchDB? Will firstly because it has a really simple API, secondly because you can make it replicate as needed and this makes for a great document based object store.

What I have been doing is:

Building an Extension

Building a development Extension Provider

Automating the updating of the Extension

Running Railo with a Java Debugger

Running tests on the extension

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With the upcoming conferences you have the great opportunity to meet the guys from Railo at a conference near you!

So who is going to be where?

CF.Objective(), Minneapolis - April, 22-24 2010

As a Gold sponsor we will have a booth where Mark Drew and Gert Franz will be present most of the time. Sean Corfield and Peter Bell are presenting some topics.

WebDU, Sydney - Australia - May, 6-7 2010

In Sydney Australia Peter Bell is going to present and represent Railo with some talks. We try to be back as sponsors again next year.

Scotch on the Rocks, London - England - May, 24-25 2010

At Scotch on the Rocks as a Gold sponsor we will have a booth as well. Mark Drew, Peter Bell and Gert Franz will be hosting it.

In addition you will be able to meet Michael Offner the main architect behind the Open Source engine as well as Andrea Campolonghi the author of the AJAX extensions in Railo.

Mark Drew and Gert Franz will have two presentations about Railo (and Railo 4.0) and Peter will cover a project management topic.

CF United - Washington - July, 28-31st, 2010

This year we will return to the Landsdowne Resort in Washington as a silver sponsor, where this year's CFUnited will take place.
We will have a booth in the sponsor area and a couple of talks with Gert Franz and Sean Corfield.
Mark Drew shall also be attending.

We will blog about out appearances later this year soon.

Spotted today on twitter, a great article: Introduction to Railo Open Source by  Andrew Schwabe on http://www.packtpub.com/

It's great to see the community writing articles that spread the word about Railo far out into other communities, which surely spreads what CFML developer's have known all along that CFML and Railo just gets things done! 

The Railo Team will be at CeBit in Hanover, Germany this year (2nd to 6th of March),  myself and Gert Franz will be joining our partners Contens and Intergral at their stand.

This is the first time that I am heading to CeBit but unfortnuately I shall only be there on the Thursday 4th of March so come say hello!

The stand will be located at hall 6 stand J32

See you there!

So this is a bit of a fishing post (at least I am being honest!)

In the next few months Railo Technologies will be working on a number of projects and we are  looking to build up a good list of contractors that can work on these projects with us.

I am not posting details of specific jobs of course, but you should have a variety of skills round CFML and CFML development, such as frameworks, ORM techniques, code optimisation and  load testing etc.

Please, read carefully now, I am not looking for agents, I am sure you have wonderful contractors and reasonable rates and make coffee to die for but please do NOT contact me.

So, if you are contracting at the moment, or will be looking for contracts in the UK and Europe over the next few months send me an email with your CV, letting me know which areas you enjoy/are good at/ both/ want to get into etc.

IF YOU ARE NOT AN AGENT, email me over at mark at getrailo dot com

Finally, as previously mentioned, I shall be treating emails from agents with the contempt they deserve, so don't ruin your day eh?

Straker, the makers of ShadoCMS and Zoom Flex have put up a great blog posting regarding using Railo in a Software as a Service environment.

They cover four areas such as Scalability, Security, Cost and Updates and even though it shows the Railo Server as a winner it is a overally fairly balanced article from the point of view of their requirements

Check out the full blog post on the Straker Blog

In case you didn't already know, alurium.com are providing a 60 day free trial of Railo hosting.

You can of course, later upgrade to various packages, but if you want to see how Railo performs on a production site, without having to stump up the cash yourself, this is a great offer.

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