The other day, I explored the idea of an audit table that copies the entire record in question, creating a full-record snap-shot in time. In the comments to that post, there was some great discussion as to how to create audits and why we might want to do it a certain way. As we mostly agreed on, the type of auditing you do is highly dependent on the business strategy and what the audit is being used for. In an application that I am working on right now, the audit data is being used as a page element on many high level, administrative pages for quality control. As such, it was very important for a staff member to be able to pop in and see exactly what was changed and who changed it. Because of this, I found that I needed the audit trail to be very accessible from a human-readable stand point; to aide this effort, I tracked audits using XML strings, recording ONLY what changed from form action to form action.

Wanting some light reading for this evening, I decided to dig into the Closures for Java draft spec (homepage). Oh. My. God. I'm a huge fan of closures. They're elegant, simple, and easy to use. Their semantics are subtle, but not confusing. They allow for very concise implementation of otherwise complicated algorithms, trimming a vast number of "normal" control structures, particularly various looping constructs.

Beta 2 of Railo 3.0 is available, and one of its download options is as a WAR suitable for any JEE server. In the Hiberailooving series, I'm building up a Hibernate + Railo + Groovy + Spring platform, and JBoss will be its intended deployment platform.

When I was sitting in on Steve Nelson's Google Gears presentation at CFUNITED, we started talking about ways to track audits to table data. One of the ideas discussed was to keep an audit table for each table we wish to track. I have never done it this way; I generally used a centralized audit table with an XML diff-field that other tables then join to. As such, I wanted to take a few minutes to explore this idea.

I have been having a lot of fun lately digging around the internals of the Adobe CF Server. With my new found knowledge I thought I would dig around structures. So how can you find out what the implementation of a structure is? Well first off you need to find out the name of the class and to do this it gets pretty tricky.

Next is the addition of the new & import keywords. The new keyword will allow you to create objects with very little sytax. With that is the addition of the import keyword which will allow us to treat our components in more of package format. Along the same lines is Implicit constructors. Right now everyone just kind of follows the guideline of using the name init as a constructor. With this though you usually have to call the constructor, in the future this will change. There are a couple ways we can go about doing this.

The final feature I want to talk about and probably one of the biggest is native ORM via Hibernate. If you have never heard of ORM it stand for Object Relational Mapping. If you want to learn more there are 2 projects for ColdFusion in the ORM market Transfer & Reactor. While its possible to use hibernate today its a very manual process and like everything else in ColdFusion they want to make it as easy as possible to use.

With other available products today there needs to be some consistency in the CFML language. With that the announcement of the CFML Language Advisory board. The board will be made up of some really great people

Today is the last day of the Stockholm AIR Browser War competition. Put on by the Stockholm Multimedia User Group, entrants create cool browsers using Adobe AIR technology and compete to win some cool Adobe software like CS3 Master Collection and CS3 Web Collection. As I said, the last day to enter is June 25th. Get your submissions in!

I installed the dependencies for the FTP Task in ANT this morning and when I ran the ANT task I promptly got this error: "Could not create type ftp due to java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/net/ftp/FTPClientConfig" Clearly, this means the FTP Client Config class was not where it was supposed to be. It turns out, the ANT thingy in Flex Builder does not read its lib directory each time. Thus, the .jar files were not noticed and registered EVEN THOUGH the ANT administration in Flex Builder registered the files. So, for those following at home, or who found this page by googling the error message above, here are the correct steps to add the .jar files to enable the FTP ANT task in Flex Builder 3 (or eclipse 3.x for that matter)

Robb is looking for a way to assign custom behavior to his User object. To his credit, he isn't immediately trying to go down the inheritance path, which is what many people will initially try. The idea of creating a base User object and extending it with AdminUser, AgentUser, etc. looks easy and appropriate upon first glance. Unfortunately, it has a big problem: inheritance is static and it is a "one or the other" proposition.

I am a fan of most all Database platforms. I have used MSSQL 7/2000/2005, IBM UDB, Oracle 8/9i/10g, MySql 4/5 and PostgreSQL 7.3/8.1 in production. When working in multiple database platforms, there inevitably comes the need to port a database from one platform to another. Rather than spend my days mapping and transforming a database schema, I use SQL Script Builder. SQL Script Builder is a tool that generates SQL scripts of a database and the data for 5 officially supported platforms:

I was born in Zurich, Switzerland, but since then traveled around the world quite a lot. Lived in Italy up until I turned 6. When I was 10 years old I started with skateboarding. Skateboarding has been good to me. I used to be sponsored by Alva Boards, Tracker and then Independent Trucks, Spitfire Wheels and Vans Shoes. During that time, I became Swiss and European skateboard Champion and traveled around the world a lot. Until 21 my "home" was sorta the world and I spent a lot of time in Huntington Beach, California.

A lot of people do not realize that by moving from ColdFusion 7x to ColdFusion 8x, you are actually switching JVM versions as well. This is important because there a few significant changes to the Java language between Java 1.4 and Java 1.6 (a.k.a. Java 6). Java 1.5 (a.k.a. Java 5) introduced two things that are especially significant in that world, annotations (JSR-175,JSR-269) and Generics (JSR-14). Let's focus on generics for now, annotations will come later.

I like to keep all the frameworks that I use up to date from their respective repositories, and, when deploying a new site or project, I will typically include the framework dependencies as a minimal include at the project root. This requires a bit of work, exporting and stripping out documentation, examples and tests from my local checkout of the framework files. As a learning objective, I decided to write an ant build file to maintain my own "nightly build" of each framework customized to carry only the core files.

I get a lot of questions on this blog and a lot more per eMail on how to fine tune Tomcat and get it running together on Apache and other stuff. Since the release of Open BlueDragon, Tomcat is more apparent to a lot of CFML-Developers then ever. I already posted an entry of how to get Tomcat running "behind" Apache and thus will focus here on the two configurations that helps the most.

If you pass "constructNonLazyBeans=true" as an argument to loadBeansFromXML, ColdSpring will automatically create any beans that you have not explicitly marked as lazy. Which means you can avoid having to manually call getBean() for all of your remote proxies. You just need to execute one initial request to your application, and it will create the remote proxies automatically. This is handy if you start having numerous remote proxies being generated.

I have added several blog postings here before on the theories of High-Availability (HA) and Clustering. In this series of blog postings I will be attempting to create dedicated postings for the following scenarios. Please keep in mind that there will be alternative ways to do these things and what I am showing here is drawn from my experiences from either creating clusters for clients or working on existing clusters Here are the scenarios I will be posting on... Setting up a two instance cluster from a fresh install of ColdFusion Load testing a two instance cluster on Java 1.6 (6.0) using the Round Robin algorithm Load testing a two instance cluster on Java 1.5 (6.0) using the Round Robin algorithm

There have been several blog posts recently about class-loading issues apparently linked the use of the Sun-Java 1.6 (6.0) JVM. Mark Mandel has a detailed article on this here. Before seeing this article we had been working on optimizing a ColdSpring-ModelGlue-Reactor application. We blogged our progress in this article. We thought a reality check was a good idea and ran some load tests comparing this same application performance in Java 1.5 and 1.6. Once again we observed better performance in 1.6; here are the results. These results are for a 50 Virtual User (vUser) Test for 1 hour with 8 second think time (delay between clicks) comparing Java 1 5 to 1.6. Firstly Java 1.5 Total Number of Clicks: 13,345 (0 Errors) Average Click Time of all URLs: 5,298 ms

Clustering in particular with ColdFusion and JRun can get fairly complicated pretty fast and I urge all who are going to embark on clustering to plan out how you want to cluster and why. Another key issue is to make sure when we are creating a web application that it designed and engineered from day one with clustering in mind. I have helped so many clients who hit major problems when they start building clusters, largely because the application was too tightly coupled to the environment it is running in. Hard-coded directory paths would be a classic example. In this blog posting I wanted to illustrate an interesting concept, well two in reality, Horizontal Clustering and Vertical Clustering. Let's look at a diagram....

I presented at CF.Objective on the subject of clustering and distributing ColdFusion applications. During the presentation I pointed out a "gotcha" I have encountered many times; where I have been asked to review existing High Availability (HA) environments. It has been mentioned before in previous blog posts but I wanted to amplify it, as I believe it is very important to avoid this pitfall. Hardware clustering devices can and often do, perform two distinct functions.

This will be the first post in a series relating to clustering ColdFusion. In this first series of posts we will be looking at clustering CF at a software level using ColdFusion 8 Enterprise. Hopefully later on, we can move to a Hardware-Software set-up with examples. I mentioned in a previous post that what I will detail is drawn from my experiences from either creating clusters for clients or working on existing clusters. There are no doubt other ways to do this. Firstly, I always create what I call a "master instance", typically the first instance which is created from a multiple-instance install. Here are some important steps from that...

I've been a bad boy. I was supposed to write a review of ColdFusion 8 back in October of last year, but an imminent change of job and my 10 month old boy (now sixteen months) conspired to eat up all my time to play with CF8, let alone write a review. When ever I did try to write a review I always ended up with writers block. All the blog entries, by developers far more knowledgeable and respected than I, seemed to already talk about all the great new features in this latest, and greatest, version of ColdFusion.

If you use ColdFusion (or another Java-based CFML runtime), you should be using Java. There's a reason that CF uses Java under the hood: Java is incredibly powerful. Yes the interface to Java from the CF level is cumbersome and creating hybrid CF/Java applications pretty much costs you CF's RAD capabilities, but there are some real gems in the Java libraries.