One of the nice aspects of the “Professional Open Source Sofware” business model is that you can be very flexible for your customers. The Railo server has a roadmap of core features and downloadable extensions - some free, some paid - but our roadmap can easily be influenced by our customers. Now that more developers are trying Railo every day, we’re seeing more interest in certain features that were already on our roadmap but were either lower priority or scheduled some distance off in the future. (more…)

Marc Funaro kicked off quite a heated debate on his blog lately by raging against people pushing object-oriented programing/design and how his attempt to follow their advice nearly led to the collapse of his business. Marc was expressing a common frustration that many of us have heard from people who try to learn OO, especially from people with a long history of procedural programming and/or no computer science background. (more…)

Lately, the committee has been looking at proposals to extend CFSCRIPT so that components can be written entirely in CFSCRIPT instead of requiring tags. Adobe has been the main driver for the proposals but other committee members have been providing their share of ideas and suggestions when we get stuck (or don’t like Adobe’s proposals).

Right now, we have a pretty solid definition of how CFSCRIPT should work so that you can write entire components. Mostly it follows what you may have seen Adobe show off at conferences but Adobe is still making changes in response to feedback from the committee (and its own banks of prerelease testers, I’m sure) and some of Adobe’s suggestions were considered vendor-specific by the committee.

But we’re stuck on a couple of tags that we’re really struggling to define in CFSCRIPT. We’d like you to help us make some decisions here!

(more…)

Many moons ago, I reported on how you could write a template to parse your server.log file for slow page reports.

In case you didn’t know - the ColdFusion Administrator lets you log files that take too long to process. This setting is found in the Logging Settings page as seen in the following screen shot:

(more…)

I’m working on a tutorial for a client involving file uploads (which I’ll be sharing on the blog). In the tutorial I talk a bit about monitoring the number of uploads and how much space they are taking.

I was curious what methods exist for finding out how much space is being used on a drive and how much space is available.

Finding out the space used by a directory is possible with CFDIRECTORY and query of query:
(more…)

Other people have talked about CFTHREAD (see Ben Nadel’s excellent post on the topic) so I’m not going to bother with a full description of the tag.

Instead I wanted to show a quick example of where I’ve already put it to use in production, and I wanted to share a warning about how you have to be careful when using the tag.

BlogCFC makes use of a ping feature when posting entries. This lets you inform blog aggregators that you’ve written a new blog post. This way your latest devotional on Paris Hilton won’t be missed by the masses.

Most aggregators simply take a simple HTTP hit, while others take a bit more work. BlogCFC supports simple HTTP pings, as well as Technorati, Weblogs, and Icerocket. The code is rather simple. You pass in the URLs you want to ping and this code block loops over them:
(more…)