CF: CFinNC presentations

Hallo everyone. First thanks for attending my sessions. If you did not attend and wanted to take a peak at what we covered please feel free to review the slides. Of course more fun was had during the sessions ;o)

Download Beginning Debugging Session

Download Advanced Debugging Session

I have inlcluded more slides and examples than we covered hoping that they can be usefull as well. All my material are distributed under creative commons license. Feel free to contact me with questions or comments.

Generally, this conference showed that the spirit of CF is alive and well. It was an all volunteer event from the organization to the speakers and all the things in between. It introduced old and new people to CF and furthered networking in this Region. I hope we can make this an annual event.

Cheers,
-B.

CF: CFinNC is all about debugging for me

My presentations for CFinNC will be all about debugging. There is a lot to talk about crunched into two 50 minutes segments.
Debugging is the often hated but yet nonetheless very important part of the developer's life fraught with lots of frustration and brief moments of glorious joy when the culprits are found. I am trying to give both the beginner and advanced audiences multiple techniques and tools to make the shining moments more frequent and frustrating times less so.

Here is my official description about the overall presentations:

Debugging can be a very frustrating exercise. Many times we find ourselves spending three times as long as it took us to develop the code to debug it. Especially code written by other developers seems time consuming to debug ;o)
Understanding the debugging infrastructure will shortcut much of the confusion and help to quickly focus on the source of the problem. What can you do when has reached is limits? We will talk about techniques, tools, and tips available to the ColdFusion Developer to make this a "less" frustrating exercise.

Hope to see you there,
B.

General: Ordering from Adobe and how not to sell.

So during the CFUnited conference Adobe and organizers offered a special deal on ColdFusion to the attendees. I thought that this was a highly cool deal. Adobe supporting the very people that promote them every day.
I quickly chatted up the Adobe people at the conference on how to accomplish this as I did have a project requiring deployment of 23 CF servers. They all were consistent, which is good; I need to talk to the Eastern Sales Rep (Dominick Conte) whom I could not find in person or in attendance anywhere, which is bad, but whose business cards where everywhere ;o)
So, upon my return, I happily attempted to call Dominick. Different times, different dates; only voice mail answering. I thought the guy must be selling this stuff like hot-cakes as he never is available via phone; so I gave up and send an email to ask how one orders these hot deals offered by Adobe on the show.
His initial response was that I was not really at the show. Interesting, approach; made me doubt my very existence for about a little less than 0.1 ms... ahhh... deep thoughts. Of course, I advised him how he can find out who attended and then was waiting for some sort of contact.
Alas, again, no-go.
I am now paraphrasing the emails that went back and forth thereafter:

Me: "hey wassup", "why you not talk to me?", and "how can I order your good stuff?" and "why is it so difficult to talk to you guys?".
Dom: "Yeah, I tried to talk to you" (I checked and no such phone logs), and " what the h..k do you want anyways?"

This is not going well I think, as I am very consitently asking this man who is in sales on how to place an order (partners, direct or what?). So, he finaly caves and shoots back an email that he is not really the dude to talk to and the only way I can get this offer is to talk to a company in Canada.

WTH?


Cheers,
B.


Addendum:
We finally did end up buying some licenses for different projects from Adobe through the reseller in Canada. The credit for this goes entirely to Adam Lehman who could get me a contact name for ordering.

Cheers,
B.

CF: CfinNC North Carolina ColdFusion / Flex / Air Conference - Oct 17-18, 2009

I will be presenting at the CFinNC conference this October. I will share some insight into working with SOLR, the search engine based on Apache Lucene as well as talk about debugging tips and tricks. If you have some insight you would like to share feel free to leave a comment.



Here are the details on the conference:

Registration for CFinNC is now open! CFinNC is a free web development conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina during the weekend of October 17th and 18th with an International line-up of speakers presenting on timely and relevant topics on web development. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and the creativity of the planning committee, registration for the event will be free and includes entry to the weekend event and to all presentations.

In order to keep the event free we have removed some hard costs and some benefits you normally get from paid-registration events.

Please be aware of the following:

1) You are responsible for paying for lunch for both days. We have enlisted the services of a local caterer and will be providing lunch each day for $10/day. This includes a sandwich, chips and drink. Please bring cash the day of the event! We will not be able to process credit cards!

2) Limited Edition, Collectible CFinNC conference t-shirts will be available for purchase for $15 with any proceeds going to offset costs and possibly sponsor a planning committee dinner (if we sell them all).

Lunch and shirt purchase is completely optional. You may indicate if you would like to purchase lunch and/or a t-shirt on the registration form.

For more information, please check the CFinNC website at: http://www.cfinnc.com


-Cheers,
Bilal

CF: Adobe publishes hot fixes for ColdFusion

On August 17, 2009 Adobe published a number of security updates to numerous versions of ColdFusion. This has led to some scrambling to test these issues, get them patched etc.
So far the hotfixes did not appear to break anything but the packaging is lacking as many manual steps will have to be completed.
I could not quite understand why these hotfixes could not have been bundled together as one fix that can be applied.
To make our lives easier I have built an installer for ColdFusion 8.0.1 running on Windows systems to do just that. You are free to use it at your own risk.

The installer will update standalone installation of CF not J2EE/JEE installations.

Thus the following hot fixes will be applied:
CVE-2009-1872, CVE-2009-1875, CVE-2009-1876, CVE-2009-1877, CVE-2009-1878

These JRUN only updates will not:
CVE-2009-1873, CVE-2009-1874

Cheers,

Impressions from CFUnited, August 12 through 15, 2009

Many people in the middle of a Golf course. Learned new stuff, rehashed old stuff. The greats of ColdFusion held court, and Flex was the up and comer with attitude.
The good:

• Open source coldfusion is engaged and attempting to move things forward. Adobe is cooperating for now. Railo was there and willing; OpenBD was there in spirit.
  
• ColdFusion builder is here despite the CFEclipse and we can expect more opinions on why one is better than the other. Adobe did not want to play in this open source game.
• ColdFusion 9 will have some expanded licensing options to make it easier to host things in the cloud.
• ColdFusion has gained some momentum but still overall a nishe.
• The food was pretty good.
  

The Bad:

• Presenters could focus more on content and less on opinion.
• Some are born to present; others not so.
• ColdFusion is still niche and we need to not get so high on ourselves.
• Flex purist insistance that they do not need to know anything about CF.
• No CFUnited backpacks for the masses. What is up with that?
  
• One hour barely covers anything technical well. More multi-hour tracks digging into topics would be helpfull for people seeking pure technology how to.

There is probably more that I missed but there you have it.

Cheers

CF: ColdFusion Serialization via Java API

This is a topic that has found many posts. Here is my spin ;o) Most of the posts focus on the success of serializing ColdFusion components. Though cool, many ask the same question: Why do this?
Also to note is that ColdFusion has supported a mechanism to serialize complex data via WDDX for a long time (I believe since version 4).
However, in my case, the need was not for serialization components but rather for compact serialization. In other words, use as little space (bytes/data) as possible. In addition, I needed to easily save and retrieve this information from a database in a text based format. Oh, yes, and handle complex data objects such as structures and arrays.
WDDX, though usable, is very verbose and thus was out. Looking at the Java API and reading through posts I translated this, in the end, to two functions fSerialize and fDeserialize. You will need ColdFusion 8.0.1 or higher to make this work.

The fSerialize function:

 <cffunction name="fSerialize" access="public" returntype="string"
 hint="uses java byte streams and Base64 encoding to serialize CF objects, this can be used instead of WDDX tag CFML2WDDX">

 <cfargument name="input" type="any" required="Yes" hint="the CF object to be serialized">
 <cfscript>

  var objByteStream = createObject("java", "java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream").init();
  var objOutStream = createObject("java", "java.io.ObjectOutputStream").init(objByteStream);
  var objSerialized ="";
  //turn CF object in argument to out stream
  objOutStream.writeObject(Arguments.input);
  objOutStream.close();
  //take outstream and make bytearray
  objSerialized = objByteStream.toByteArray();
  //encoded it and return

  return BinaryEncode(objSerialized,"Base64");
 </cfscript>
</cffunction>

fDeserialize function:

 <cffunction name="fDeserialize" access="public" returntype="any"
 hint="uses Base64 encoded Java Byte Array and turns to CF object. This can be used instead of WDDX WDDX2CFML">

 <cfargument name="Input" type="string" required="Yes" hint="the Base64 encoded ByteArray that used to be a CF object to be deserialized">
 <cfscript>

  var objSerialized =BinaryDecode(Arguments.input,"Base64");
  var inByteStream = createObject("java", "java.io.ByteArrayInputStream").init(objSerialized);
  var objInStream = createObject("java", "java.io.ObjectInputStream").init(inByteStream);
  var objCF = objInStream.readObject();
  //return the read object
  return objCF;  
 </cfscript>
</cffunction> 

These function on average were using 50% of the storage that a comparable serialized WDDX object would, so they achieved their objective for me. They will work on small components (cfc) but I have not tried to serialize very complex cfcs.

Cheers,
-Bilal