[Looking for Charlie's main web site?]

Thrilled to be speaking at Adobe CF Summit East, Apr 6

I'm thrilled to announce that I've been asked to present again at the Adobe ColdFusion Summit East 2023, a free one-day conference being held in Washington DC on Apr 6, at the Marriott Marquis.

For more on the event, my talk, and how this means I have to skip attending/speaking at DevNexus the same week, read on.

[....Continue Reading....]

Did you know that CF2018 imports environment vars into the Server scope?

Note: This blog post is from 2020. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
This is a hidden gem that I never saw documented anywhere: CF2018 now imports environment variables into the CF "server" scope, specifically:

server.system.environment

and java system properties into:

server.system.properties

(Thanks to Sean C for catching a mistake in the initial post.)

I learned of it last year when Pete F tweeted about it, and I assumed someone else would do a post about it, but the topic came up in a discussion today and I was surprised to not be able to find any mention of it, other than that and his mention of it in his cfdocs.org site.

And yes, Lucee had it first (as proposed initially in 2015). :-)

The feature can be useful, whether you're setting such vars when running a (Docker) container, or via JVM args, etc., and you want to be able to access them within CFML.

"Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 2018", a multi-part series on the Adobe Portal

Note: This blog post is from 2019. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Over the past few weeks I have been begun posting a multi-part series of blog entries on Hidden Gems in CF2018. This is being posted on the Adobe CF portal, rather than here (by my choice).

It's basically presenting the same info I've been offering in my talk of the same name, such as at conferences like CF Summit and CFCamp last year, and that I will at the CF Summit East 2019 in DC in April. Of course, in blog form I can elaborate things a little more.

So far I have done the following parts:

[....Continue Reading....]

Easily finding cached/old versions of a site/page when it's down or gone

Note: This blog post is from 2017. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Have you ever had a web site "go dark" on you? or found that a given page on a site somehow disappeared? Maybe it's only temporary (there may even be a "we're down" message, though the site or server may just fail to respond at all), or maybe the failure of the page or site will be permanent.

The good news is that there are at least two easy ways that you may well still be able to see that content you may be missing:

  • the Google cache (to at least see the last version which Google may have cached)
  • the internet archive "wayback machine", which often lets you see YEARS back in the history of a page or entire site, including one that may be long-gone.
  • and still another couple of options

TLDR;

Try putting either cache: or web.archive.org/ in front of the URL of whatever page you're trying to visit, as in:

http://web.archive.org/https://www.carehart.org/index.cfm

to perhaps see years of archived versions of a page/site.

Or to see any Google snapshot of the most recent cached version of a page, use this in a Google search,

cache:https://www.carehart.org/index.cfm

Either may or may not work, for various reasons I explain below. And note that this works for domain names or individual web page URLs. You may find that it also works with or without the protocol (http:// or https://), but try using it the other way if one does not work.

For much more, read on, as I share tips (and gotchas) on using both tools.

[....Continue Reading....]

My upcoming presentations for spring/summer 2017: some on CF, some on other topics

Note: This blog post is from 2017. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
I'm going to be speaking several times in the coming weeks and months (on several topics, some on ColdFusion and/or CFML, some on generic topics applying to any server, and one on SQL Server 2016 SP1 specifically). I thought I ought to post that fact here (I have often failed to think to do that here over the years).

I offer below first the events at which I'll be speaking, and then the preso titles and descriptions for any readers interested. (As an update, I was informed on 5/16/17 that I'd been selected to speak at NCDevCon. While it's not in "spring/summer" per the subject above, I've added it to the info below.)

[....Continue Reading....]

I'll be speaking at the Adobe ColdFusion Summit in Vegas, Oct 10-11. See you there!

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Many have been asking if I'd be speaking again at this year's Adobe ColdFusion Summit, in Last Vegas (Oct 10-11). I will indeed!

(There was some challenge in getting all the speakers posted until just last week, so though I had known I was speaking for months, I held off announcing it until I could point to the link.)

I'll be presenting (as I do for each release) my "Hidden Gems In ColdFusion 2016" See the description via the links above. It should be as classically useful as ever, whether for those either new to or experienced with CF 2016.

I certainly do appreciate the conference team selecting me again to be a speaker. I've spoken at each of the 3 so far, the first in 2013.

The conference is always a great time (and has gotten larger and better each year, by most accounts). And Vegas is of course a great location (though honestly I barely leave the venue the whole time). Then there are all the great attendees, and sponsor booths, as well as nearly the entire CF team on hand, and of course lots of useful information shared from all the presenters.

If you'll be attending, I hope to see you there! And if you're still considering it, see the Why attend? page and other links offered there. Finally, note that the "early bird" price has been extended to August 31. See the Pricing page.

I'll be speaking at dev.Objective() conference, June 15-17. See you there!

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
I'll be speaking at next week's dev.Objective() Conference, in Minneapolis (June 15-17). The conference is always a great time, in a great location, with great people, and lots of useful information shared, and I appreciate the conference team selecting me again to be a speaker. If you'll be attending, I hope to see you.

[....Continue Reading....]

CF10 Hidden Gem: New method to obtain ColdFusion instance name via CFML code

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
One of the many hidden gems in CF10 is that there's a new way to programmatically obtain the current instance name. In CF 6-9, we had to call a method in a JRun class. In CF10, they've added a new method in the Admin API.

The quick answer is that there's a getInstanceName method in the runtime.cfc of the Admin API. And yes, any user can execute this code. They do not need to BE an admin. You can use this in production code. For more, see below.

If that's enough to get you going, have at it. For more info, read on.

[....Continue Reading....]

Slides available for my two recent talks: Hidden gems in CF10 & About ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat

Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
If you're interested in checking out the slides for my two most recent talks, they are now available online:

These were offered recently at cf.objective() and the SOTR/CF10 European Tour events, as I had announced a couple of weeks ago.

These are just PDFs of the slides for now, no recordings. But as those who have seen me talk before know, I tend to offer a lot of detail in my slides, so that they do stand well alone (against the modern fashion of slides that are mostly just pictures).

Sure, I could do more pictures and offer slide notes. It's not that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, just that it takes a lot more patience! :-) I may modify these presentations that way, in fact, for future presentations of them. In fact, I will be blogging shortly about the next planned presentation of them for the Adobe CF 10 Developer Week coming up in June.

BTW, apologies to any folks from the two events who had looked for the PDF for the Tomcat talk previously. Somehow I had failed to offer a link to the PDF on the presentations page, even though I was updating and uploading new variations of it both before and after the events. Darn.

New for CF9 (and 9.0.1): a query timeout that may really work, with a caveat

Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
This is a very interesting change in CF9 (and 9.0.1), which has slipped under the radar for the most part it seems.

Did you know there is now a setting in the DSN page of the CF Admin (for most of the Adobe-provided DB drivers) which allows you to set a maximum timeout for queries against that DSN?

It's a new feature enabled for the DataDirect drivers, as updated in CF 9. (You will not see it if you use an "other" datasource type, such as when using a downloaded JDBC driver that you implement on CF.)

The caveat? This timeout is ONLY settable there in the DSN definition, not in CFQUERY (or CFSTOREDPROC) itself, which is a shame. The existing TIMEOUT attribute for those (CF10 added it for CFSTOREDPROC) is not the same and generally does not work. Still, the value of this even at the DSN level is too important to ignore for some challenges. More on that (and some other thoughts) in a moment.

[....Continue Reading....]

More Entries

Copyright ©2024 Charlie Arehart
Carehart Logo
BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.005.
(Want to validate the html in this page?)

Managed Hosting Services provided by
Managed Dedicated Hosting