29th Jul2010

Simple jQTouch App

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I did a simple and fast jQTouch web applicatio

n for a friend, for the start of the Edinburgh Festival.

It does only target the iPhone, but that seems to be okay for the marketing aspect and speed was of the essence as I needed to get one finished and out soon for him.   You can view it at: http://iphone.pincervodka.com/ .  It uses Geolocation API and also links out to Google Maps to show you directions to the bar you want to go to, or suggest the nearest bar to where you are.

More interestingly though, it uses ColdFusion 9 as the back end, with Terry Ryan’s Apptactular to quickly generate the ORM and scaffolding for an administration module for adding bars and cocktails and other info from a simple MySQL schema.   Made it nice and easy and well worth checking out all the relevant bits of technology involved (although I recently saw the Sencha implementation of the mobile web application framework, via the CFUnited mobile application which looks good!)

As a side note, last summer I actually did a native Android version of this app for him, as a learning process which was much nicer feel to it and had much better integration into the Geolocation features for a smart phone.   It was targetting Android 1.6 and at that time, Android hadn’t quite taken off, so the marketing aspect pushed for an iPhone version and I ran out of time to learn Obj-C last year due to work commitments.   I might blog at a later date and talk about it, as most of the concepts are still valid for the newer, sexier Android 2.2.

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26th Jul2010

Changes to JSON in ColdFusion 9.0.1

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There has been some changes with the way that ColdFusion handles encoding JSON in the 9.0.1 Updater.   In versions before 9.0.1, any number, or string that looked like a number was converted to a float.   For example, in ColdFusion 9.0.0:

  1. 20 or “20″ becomes 20.0
  2. 42.1 or “42.1″ becomes  42.1
  3. 000567 or ”000567″ becomes 567.0
This didn’t suit development as often there was a valid use case to keep the preceding zero’s where, for example, the number was a fixed number digit of digit ID string (ie example 2 above).   For ColdFusion 9.0.1, a couple of decisions were made by Engineering during the beta phase of development, and it was decided to cast all numbers to Strings after discussions with various users of ColdFusion.
This then means that the following would happen by default in a ColdFusion 9.0.1 server:
  1. 20 or “20″ becomes “20″
  2. 42.1 or “42.1″ becomes “42.1″
  3. 000567 or ”000567″ becomes “000567″
Awdhesh, the Engineer, also made a decision to ensure backwards compatibility, and put in a JVM argument flag which would then forced ColdFusion 9.0.1 to behave the same as 9.0.0.   He comments on this over at Ray’s Blog Post on JSON.  You can force this old behaviour by adding the following to your JVM args:
  • -Djson.numberasdouble=true

With the argument above, using the same examples, the following is the output for a JVM Arg’d ColdFusion 9.0.1 server:

  1. 20 or “20″ becomes 20
  2. 42.1 or “42.1″ becomes 42.1
  3. 000567 or ”000567″ becomes 000567
This should solve most of the issues folks are having with backwards compatibility, and if not, and you have a specific use case, please log a bug so the Engineering team can track it and make a decision on it at the ColdFusion bugtracker.

 

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15th Jul2010

ColdFusion 9.0.1 Certified JVM Version for 1.6

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UPDATE: Got some new information, 1.6.0_17 is also supported!

With ColdFusion 9.0.1 Updater, the certified JVM version for Java 1.6 from Adobe ColdFusion Engineering is:

  • 1.6.0_14
  • 1.6.0_17
This is the officially supported JVM versions, although with some caution, upgrading an update release (ie 1.6.0_14 -> 1.6.0_17) can be done with a full test cycle on your application(s) to ensure no behaviourial changes.  
You do this at your own risk though, Engineering have certified CF on the JVM version above (for 1.6) so unless you have a specific issue that a JVM update version fixes, it is usually best to stay at the supported levels.

 

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14th Jul2010

ColdFusion 9.0.1 Updater Released

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Title says it all, get it from Adobe.com ColdFusion Updates page.

There are a few good CF guru posts out there worth reading up on to get the details and feedback from:

I need to do some research and playing with the new LCDS 3 integration, which is the feature I am most excited about.  All worth a read to find the latest news, and also helps me fill up some posts on my new blog.  Thanks guys!
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14th Jul2010

LCDS 3, Tomcat and Basic Auth

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I had to do a small sample for showing LCDS 3 and Tomcat 6 showing BASIC authentication working.   Here is the sample that is a Flash Builder 4 project, its very simple but shows it working:

I haven’t included the LCDS 3 JAR files, you just need to drop them into /WebContent/WEB-INF/lib.   There is also a /tomcat folder, drop the contents into your Tomcat directory (back up existing files if you have made your own changes to them!)

You can get the LCDS binary from the Adobe.com site.

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12th Jul2010

Benchmarking Flex Compiler Performance

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I got reminded of this by a question just today.   If you have what you think is slow complication in Flex/Flash Builder (or even plain old mxmlc) then you can use the compiler option -benchmark=true to get extra statistics out of it like the following:

 

Initial setup: 438ms
Loaded 11 SWCs: 6156ms
Files: 614 Time: 9093ms
Linking… 63ms
Optimizing… 1047ms
SWF Encoding… 1281ms
C:dataappseclipsemyworkspacetest-flexstoresrcbin-debugflexstore.swf (527048 bytes)
Total time: 18094ms
Peak memory usage: 71 MB (Heap: 52, Non-Heap: 19)

You should also consider trying to compile from out with flex (use -dump-config from within Flex/Flash Builder to get the inital flex-config.xml to ease compiling from the command line).

The above won’t help you solve any compilation problems, but it will let you capture metrics to compare different options you try when trying to speed it up.   Maybe the tips to speed up compilation will be a future post!

 

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12th Jul2010

Where the HOSTS file lives on Windows 7 64 bit

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This one has flummoxed me a little, due to the virtualisation techniques employed by Microsoft in getting 32 bit and 64 bit to play nicely together.   I couldn’t find the HOSTS file at the normal %Windir%System32driversetc path when I was navigating to in Windows Explorer, it just wasn’t there. Thankfully someone posted it on their own blog which I keep referencing.   Basically open up Notepad as an Administrator, and put the following into the Open field:

  • %Windir%System32driversetchosts

Windows does a redirection based the above path and finds it for you.   For a full description of the why, head on over to  http://www.sepago.de/d/helge/2009/06/04/where-is-the-hosts-file-on-windows-x64

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12th Jul2010

Troubleshooting the ColdFusion Server Manager

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I had a case where the Server Manager was behaving erratically when lots of instances were added to it.   In troubleshooting I can see that each server logs in and out and some never keep their connection.  When I first did it, I got lots of issues with the server manager logging in and out.   I checked out what was happening by using Charles, and I could see that there was a Duplicate HTTP Session detected.   With some research, I found out that this happened when you were using the Server Manager to contact several instances on the one physical IP address.

 

I added the following to my HOSTS file so that I could use the instance directly in the Server Manager:

——— added to HOSTS file —————

10.131.96.138     sm-c01-i01
10.131.96.138     sm-c01-i02
10.131.96.138     sm-c01-i03
10.131.96.138     sm-c01-i04
10.131.96.138     sm-c01-i05

10.60.204.123     cf900-clust02-inst01
10.60.204.123     cf900-clust02-inst02

——— added to HOSTS file —————

I then edited all the server instances in server manager to use each of the pseudo domain names for the Host form field.   Note that each of these need to be different, pointing to two instances on one domain name will give the Duplicate error.

After that, I restarted the Server Manager and all instances logged in on the Server Manager and I have been able to play about for half an hour, an hour without any problems, deploying hotfixes and comparing instances.

 As always, Charles is your friend and it was using Charles that let me see the actual error message returned by a server instance to give me something to bite onto, and research.

 

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12th Jul2010

LCDS Load Test Tool and Flash Builder 4

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Here is a walk through I recently did showing how to set up the LiveCycle Data Services Load Test Tool within Flash Builder 4.   This allows for development of the load test tool to extend it and fit more closely in with your own scenario.   Bear in mind it is a draft, if I get round to finishing it, I’ll post back here but there is a lot of content in it the now, maybe a little too much as usual.

Any feedback please leave a comment and I’ll try and incorporate it.

 

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12th Jul2010

Al Usher – Silverhum (John Talabot Mix)

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This really is one of the greatest tunes of 2010 and is a must buy.   Get it on Ewan Pearson’s excellent mix album “We Are Proud of Our Choices” or on 12″ on Ewan’s Misericord Records:

Al Usher – Silverhum (John Talabot Wilderness Mix) by John Talabot

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