Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

This weekend I got a package in the post, with an awesome t-shirt from the NYCFUG! I want to thank Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel from Epicenter Consulting for sending me such an awesome item as well as for the fantastic reception I had at the NYCFUG in May! 

A few people have asked me to post my presentations, and I should have done so anyway straight after the conferences, but of course, since I did three presentations + a Mystery Theatre at cfobjective and four presentations at Scotch on the Road I have been falling behind normal work and blog postings.

So, here for your delectation are all the presentations for you to download... (apart from the Mystery Theatre 3000 since that has a naughty picture in it)

• Atomic Reactor: or how I stopped worrying and love the ORM
• ColdSpring: Better Living through configuration
• Which Framework? ColdBox, Mach-ii and Model Glue compared
• Whats Railo 3.1 Open Source?
• Railo in the Cloud
• ModelGlue and You

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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I am currently in Zürich, after doing two days training on ModelGlue, Reactor, ColdSpring, Test Driven Development and Ant (a lot packed into two days I tell you!) as well as hanging out with Gert Franz, the first time since we both starting working with each other!

Anyway, on Friday the 8th of May I am heading off to New York City to hang out with Peter Bell for a few days which shall be a blast again, just before cfObjective, and to present at the New York CFUG on the 12th of May.

Find out more details over at the New York CFUG (http://www.nycfug.com/) come over and join us, as well as having a beer (they do beer in NYC right?)

That's right, before heading to the fantastic cfObjective conference on Wednesday 13th of May, Gert Franz and myself (Mark Drew in case you didn't realise) will be hanging out in New York with the other Railo Meister Peter Bell

We should be arriving in time for Friday the 8th of May, before Escaping from New York and heading up north to Minneapolis!

Nothing confirmed just yet but there should be a cf_drinks happening maybe on Monday 11th Tuesday 12th if anyone is in the area?

We promise good deeds and a plethora of interesting accents at least! Come one, come all!

In my last post I wrote about using RAM as a nice resource to render things from. For this post I shall go through doing a quick demo of the database resource.

That's right. You can use a database exacly like you would a file system.

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The great guys at Integral have released yet another great product, FusionDebug 3.0 beta 1 for Railo!

It has all the features you expect from FusionDebug, but one of the most important things is that is FAST!

Of course, you don't have to believe me, but to prove it, I have done a little video that you can see for yourself.

Thanks Integral!

In my last post I wrote about using ZIP and FTP as resource locations.

Today, I want to focus on why you might want to use RAM as a resource. Imagine the situation, for some crazy reason, you happen to have some code in your database, that you want to actually run. Its in fact just a text string, but you want to run this code. Let's say it is a code example in a blog post or something. How would you get this code to run?

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One of the many features that I find fantastic in Railo, and has been the topic of many a "after-work-down-the-pub" conversations, has been that of mappings.

How I have normally used mappings in the past has just been been to be able to access frameworks such as ModelGlue, Reactor and ColdSpring without having to put them in the webroot.

You can still do this with Railo of course, and even set that resource as trusted, but what I wanted to show was some of the really neat features of other types of mappings.

Railo supports the ability to create a mapping to other types of resources, such as FTP, HTTP, SFTP, Amazon's S3, ram and ZIP (and TAR and TGZ) filesystems.

A quick example of where this might be used is to move old logfiles to a zip file. this happens to everyone's server once in a while, you have a bunch of log files that need moving to zip, all you have to do is create a mapping to the zip file:
Virtual: /archive
Resource: zip:///Users/markdrew/wwwroot/mapping_examples/archive.zip

And then you have one line of code to move that log file to the archive:

    <cffile action="move" source="biglog.log" destination="/archive/biglog.log">

If you need to read it from the archive it is just as easy:

    <cffile action="read" file="/archive/biglog.log" variable="content">
    <cfdump eval=content>

There you go, same line without having to do cfzip or anything like that. Just move the item to that resource.

But wait! Lets say I want to move the logs off the server, and put them onto an FTP site. What do we do then? Well, we could change our code to use cfftp, or just change the mapping:

Virual: /archive
Resource: ftp://username:password@ftpsite.com/uploads/

Save it, the code does the same and voila, we are now saving it to an FTP site!  Nice!

As I hope nearly everyone has heard by now, Railo finally went open source yesterday, you can check out the new Open Source Railo site at http://www.getrailo.org and as well that Railo Technologies has started up http://www.getrailo.com

But this post isn't about that. I have been involved with the guys at Railo for a long time and been very impressed with the work that they have been doing, so much so that I have decided to buy join them.

So, as from today I am the CEO of Railo Technologies UK.

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