I did a Breeze Presentation on Ajax for ColdFusion Developers to the local Boston CFUG and the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group. The presentation was fast-pased, but I covered 60 slides, 10 examples, and Q&A in 60 minutes... I wanted to get an Ajax overview, talk about history, problems, alternatives, libraries, frameworks, design patterns, architectures, and provide code ready to go using prototype, dojo, spry, ajaxCFC, and more.

The main idea was to cover as much as possible and allow you to go back and review it in your own pace. Find below links to the

• Breeze Presentation
• Slides
• Source Code

To use the code simply unzip in your web root.

http://www.techfeed.net/cfQuickDocs/ is now http://www.cfquickdocs.com/. It definitely deserved its own domain. I've got this page aliased a CF in Firefox and use it, almost every day.... especially cuz Eclipse does not have this documentation built in like old homesite used to, so I recur to this site all the time. It's faster that the MM/Adobe docs by the factor of at least 10x or 20x.... bookmark it CF community, it's worth it.

How about a plugin for eclipse now Yacob?

So lately I ran into this problem where my CMS was converting Flash embed tags into invalidtags and it drove me crazy ... I initially blamed the fckeditor, but when I tried to update my DB with a plain textarea and it did the same I realized the problem must be either in the DB or in my drivers... For those of you who haven't experienced this yet, every time you submit text content to be saved in the db, and 'script', 'embed', and probably many other tags will be automatically replaced by 'invalidtag' tags.... so my clients were uploading swfs, and it kept breaking.

I finally found the problem... ColdFusion has an option in the admin:  Enable Global Script Protection, which I guess after the 7.0.2 update started blocking embed tags coming from form posts. I'm not sure how much protection it provides me since I'm usually pretty good validating all my data, but this fact alone made me turn it off in every development and production server.

Now you know, if you start seeing invalidtag's appearing randomly, just disable the global script protection ...

if you're looking for a simple chat application for your web site check out CFOpenChat. It's a simple customizable chat for ColdFusion using ajaxCFC, works with mssql, mysql, and it's free and open source.

Adobe Flex 2 has been out for a couple of months now, and lots of ColdFusion customers are discovering that the combination of ColdFusion and Flex allows them to deliver powerful and engaging applications easier than ever before.

One area of confusion appears to be the Adobe Flex server: Adobe Flex Data Services. What is Adobe Flex Data Services? What exactly does Flex Data Services allow you to do that you wouldn't be able to do without it? What does this mean specifically to us ColdFusion developers?

Ben Forta's new article Adobe Developer Center article entitled ColdFusion and Flex: Do you need Flex Data Services? explains.

I'll be presenting Ajax for ColdFusion Developers to both the local Boston CFUG and also the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group.  The event detail for the OCFMG is:

http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/events/5113555/

I was tempted to use the same pressos I have at the Ajax World Conference, but I think I may change it up a bit and add some opinions about Spry, Ajax Vs. Flex, ColdFusion Frameworks, and then some... I want this not to be another Ajax presentation, but something that clears up doubts in the community ... if you have any specific topics you want me to cover, there is still time...

See you all there.

I just uploaded a small patch into ajaxCFC for the Model-Glue examples to work on the CFMX DevNet Edition. I had the core examples already patched, but I found that the MG were not.

I will release a major engine update within the next few days.

Quick reminder: I'll be speaking tomorrow at the South Florida CFUG. The session is on Model-Glue and Unity. I will start with defining design patterns, implicit invocation, MVC, and then go into detail about the MG implementation: data flow, event handlers, listeners, models, views, ... To cover Unity I would probably need several hours, so I don't think I will get into scaffolding, and ColdSpring in details (autowiring, proxies, aop) ...

I'll post my slides tomorrow.

If you're developing in Model-Glue:Unity, you may already know that you are working with ColdSpring and Reactor. ColdSpring may seem obvious because you set up all Model-Glue's properties with ColdSpring; as the matter of fact, Model-Glue is a ColdSpring application.
However, Model-Glue also ties to Reactor, which you may decide to use or not. A little performance tip is to set Reactor to production mode if you're not using it, because whether you use it or not, it will take up resources.
To chance it to production mode open ColdSpring.xml, find the reactorConfiguration bean, and modify the mode to <property name="mode"><value>production</value></property>

I am still not sure exactly why it would make such a difference, but in the project I'm currently working, which does not use Reactor at all, it improved the load time from 700ms to 100ms, having Model-Glue set to always reload.

I just can't believe there is no official documentation on this issue. If you ever tried to install ColdFusion MX7 on a Windows 2003 Server with sp1 pre installed, your ColdFusion will not install properly.

I just tried to install it over 20-30 times, changing settings, nt security, firewall, web server, jrun, man .. everything! I tried to install it on an AMD 64 bit CPU running Windows 2003 Server. The 64 bit threw me off, and I almost returned it and ordered a new system... the strange fact is that I have other AMD 64bits running ...

Regardless of the installation type, standalone, multiserver, using the built-in web server, iis, or apache, it will always finish the install with errors. If you look at the logs you will see 2 or 3 non-fatal errors:

ERROR - jrun.xmljava.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\JRun4\tmpmove.bat (Access is denied)

or

ERROR - jrun.xmljava.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\CFusionMX7\tmpmove.bat (Access is denied)

Web Server Connector Configuration Error
Status: ERROR
Additional Notes: ERROR - JNDI port 2902 for server cfusion is not active

The last one I don't have the exact error, but it was something along the line of cannot find C:\CFUsionMX7\lib

Missing the entire /lib folder does not look so 'non-fatal' to me. Anyways, ColdFusion would not start. After trying everything known to man, I even tried to copy the /lib folder from another server.... nada, nothing.

I found two solutions to this problem:
1) Reinstall sp1 on top of the pre-installed sp1.
2) A little easier, and I still don't know why this works, install CF with the silent mode. Run the CF install file from a command line (DOS box) with "-f silent.properties" and it will take 2 mins to install. Silent.properties is a file that you must create using a text editor. See this technote for details.

I installed it silently with the built-in server, and then manually attached the IIS connectors. It also installed the Report Builder, I guess it's part of the silent install... so I removed it after it was done. I kept a copy of the silent.properties if anyone needs it, but it's close to the template provided in the technote.

Adobe should document this issue! Next time you're installing CFMX7 on a W2k3 box, remember this post, it may save you days.