There appears to be an issue starting Railo Express on Windows Vista, at least on the test machines and VMs I’m using. Basically you double click on start.bat, the DOS window opens, and then closes. This is because Windows Vista is starting the batch file with System32 as the working directory, and the batch file is looking to start java from that folder. The fix is fortunately simple.
After hearing Gert Franz speak not too long ago at a conference about Railo (a free OpenSource ColdFusion Engine), I started playing with it. If you’re a fellow ColdFusion junkie, Railo makes it extremely easy to evaluate without any length installations. In fact, I had Railo up and running today on a reimaged laptop today in less than 5 minutes – delayed only by my slow download of the 60 meg ZIP.
I’ve updated the cfQuickDocs plugin to use the proper www.cfQuickDocs.com site. I know there were some issues last time, they should all be resolved now. You may need to remove the previous version if you have it installed. You can use this link to install it.
I’ve recently accomplished having my application rebuild its datasource when the application is created in BlueDragon 7. I’m not sure how supported this is going to be by New Atlanta, but a neat little hack anyways. First let me state that while this seems like an odd thing to do, the purpose of this was to allow users of my application to modify a configuration file to setup their datasource instead of have them muck around in the BD7 Admin.
For one reason or another you may need to determine logically if a page you are coding is being called by CFSCHEDULE. The way I’ve done this in the past is by examining the CGI scope for the http_user_agent. I’m not sure about older or newer versions of ColdFusion, but with CFMX 7, ColdFusion passes “CFSCHEDULE” as the value. So in your code you could do something like:
In the last few weeks I’ve been toying a bit with AJAX in some simple demo ColdFusion apps – pretty much just testing the waters. For anyone who, like me, has been slow to adopt AJAX, it’s time to jump in. I’ll try and post some of my little samples for anyone who might be thinking of trying it out sometime soon. In the mean time, here was my experience…
I’ve recently been troubleshooting an application that fails when run on Internet Explorer with the error “Action Canceled”. The page itself was pretty simple and something I had done many times before – it dynamically generated an RTF document and then prompted the user to download the file. After a few hours of minor tweaks to my code, and plenty of time scouring Google, it turns out that IE was generating this error because I was calling the page that was doing the download in a new window. Not sure why, but I guess this is a no-no. I changed my link to open in the current window instead of a new target and it immediately started working.
As you might already be aware, 2007 brings new time zone rules for most of the US and Canada. This marks the first time the rules have changed in quite a long time. To make sure that ColdFusion MX knows what the new rules are, you should upgrade your servers copy of JVM. The following Adobe tech note gives links to the downloads, as well as installation instructions:
I build the following into a scheduled task recently to cleanup my CF temporary files. I put files here when they’re uploaded, being processed, or temporary attachments that are being mailed out. Because of my mail spooler settings, I’d rather not CFFILE DELETE them immediately, but rather a day or so later.
I see questions posted in various places regarding ColdFusion applications trying to access remote network shares. The most common problem in doing this is getting denied access — and the most common troubleshooting step is logging into the server and accessing the share. They can often access the share just fine. Unfortunately, this thought process is flawed. The reason is because ColdFusion is not running as any user who is logged in, it is running using a service account (such as one you’ve created, or LocalSystem). This account probably doesn’t have access to the remote share.
Read my review of RoboForm here.