Note: This blog post is from 2009. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Some may know that among my CF411.com site's list of 700+ tools/resources for CFers in 125 categories, I have long listed the 30+ CF frameworks. (Yes, there really are that many.)

But until now, I just listed them all together, without any subcategory. Today I took a shot to categorize them and saw 3 categories:

• CFML Application Frameworks/Methodologies
• CFML Injection Frameworks/Methodologies
• CFML ORM Frameworks/Methodologies

How did I do? Are these good categories? Most of them fit in the first category (about 25) are in the first category. I didn't want to break them down into which were MVC, etc. Should I bother?

Two are in the injection frameworks category (ColdSpring and Lightwire). How's that for a category name? And there are four in the ORM category.

Are things in the right place? Any needed additions/subtractions? As with all the categories in the CF411 list, I welcome suggestions, corrections, etc.

And if you didn't know there were 30-some CF frameworks, check out the list:

CFML Frameworks/Methodologies

One last request: before you comment, please check the other comments and see if I may have already changed/corrected something.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 know anyone needing to learn the fundamentals of web application development--not CFML, but things like HTML, CSS, Javascript, and so on--here's an interesting resource.

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

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 was working with a client the other day where it turned out they had a HUGE SQL Server tempdb. I shared with them some pretty substantial and informative MS resources. In case this may ever happen to my readers, I wanted to pass them along:

• Working with tempdb in SQL Server 2005 - a 21-page Microsoft TechNet article, with lots of info on understanding, configuring, maintaining, and troubleshooting problems with tempdb. While written for SQL Server 2005, it could be useful for those on 2000 or 2008 as well. (Should that link ever fail, here's another.)
• Troubleshooting Insufficient Disk Space in tempdb
• For more on how its usage has increased for SQL Server 2005, see Capacity Planning for tempdb
• Finally, for more on managing its growth, see Optimizing tempdb Performanc

You may want to check out several other equally useful TechNet articles on SQL Server (like the first one above, but available on a wide range of issues).

Hope that's helpful to someone.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. 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 wanted to share here some info I shared on a mailing list. Someone asserted that "there's been little to no attention given by Adobe towards fixing bugs in the Report Builder feature". Well, no doubt many have long ago dismissed it if they used it when it first came out in CF7 and hit some snags.

But to be clear, there have been many improvements made to it in each release/point release and CHFs since then (whether bug fixes, minor improvements, or even some modest ones).

For those interested, just search for "report" in the following documents (to find references to cfreport and report builder):

• 7.01 release notes
• 7.02 release notes
• 7.02 CHF 1-3 release notes
• 8 release notes
• 8.01 release notes
• 8.01 CHF 1-3 release notes

I do realize that many may think there's still plenty more to be updated, but at least it shows it's not really been "little to no attention". :-)

Not picking a fight with anyone. I really think most just haven't noticed, so thought this may be helpful.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. 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.

Next time you have (or see someone ask) a question about finding some resource or tool related to CF, first check out CF411.com. :-) It's a list of more than 700 tools and resources in over 100 categories. You might find not just one but many alternatives. I hope this will help folks who might otherwise ask or answer questions on mailing lists, forums, and blog comments where such requests frequently appear.

So what's in it?

It's not a FAQ. Rather, some will recognize this as my long-existing list of tools and resources, which this weekend I decided to rechristen it as CF411. The domain name above simple redirects to that part of my site, now also called: CF411.

Far more than just tools, it also has dozens of categories of resources: CF job resources, self-help resources, professional assistance resources, tutorial sites, conferences, hosting alternatives, certification prep resources, other sites listing CF resources, and much more.

And the tools list has several dozen categories, both those written in CFML (like caching, debugging, file uploading, and code generating tools, as well as CMSs, all the frameworks, and all the CFML engines, to name just a few), and just as many tools not written in CFML but useful for us (including database tools, editors, http debugging, log analysis, load testing, monitoring, and source code tools, to name a few), whether free or commercial.

Like my UGTV, I offer CF411 as a contribution to the community, to save people spending a lot of time looking/asking around for stuff. I hope it becomes another one-stop shop for people to find what they need (well, I use the term "shop" loosely. As always, it's all free).

What's in a name?

I hope the new name will just be easier for people to remember/think of the next time they see a question asked that they know is (or think may be) answered on my list, telling folks: "You should check out CF411."

I was torn about bothering with a new domain name. I didn't need to bother with my UGTV site: you can google that phrase and my site comes up first (even with Microsoft having launched their own UGTV), but I just figured it might be easier for people to reference in conversation, and some might naturally look for a domain name.

As always, I welcome contributions if you think of something (a category or a tool/resource) that I've not listed.

I'll begin blogging again soon to highlight more of the many categories.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. 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.

Interested in getting into cloud computing? Check out this blog entry with a compendium of links to other resources on the topic:

http://highscalability.com/useful-cloud-computing-blogs

By cloud computing, most think of Amazon EC2 and S3, but there really are more options, as shown in one resource listed on that entry.

I should note I didn't create that list. Someone else did. I don't generally do an entry just pointing to that of another (we often see way too many dupes in the CF blogosphere that way), but in this case it's a non-CF blog and therefore many readers here may not see it otherwise.

Also, some will know that I do like to do such resource lists myself, whether as blog entries of that sort, or as resources lists offered on my site, so I really appreciate this blogger's efforts here.

Hope that may help someone interested in the topic of cloud computing. (And yes, if someone would ask if this might be a good topic for the Online ColdFusion Meetup, it would be, and we've had a few sessions on the topic. You can find them either by doing a search for "amazon" on the UGTV site (which has more than just Meetup recordings, of course) or by scanning the list of all previous CF meetup recordings.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. 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 thought some others might be concerned about something odd I just noticed, regarding the "recent CF technote" feed I just blogged about. I'm noticing that several of these "recent" technotes (even a couple months old) don't show up on the pages that purport to list all the CF technotes! Yikes. That means that if you're not following the feed, you may not otherwise have any way to know that there are new tech notes.

And sadly, the feed lists only the 10 latest, so there may be others you could have missed out on if you've not been getting the feed. What's up with that?

Perhaps the HTML page is just out of synch with the feed but then I'd wonder where the feed is getting its source information? and why isn't the technote page updated immediately with that same info?

Here are a couple of examples that show up (as of today at least) on the recent CF technote feed list but do not show up on the page listing technotes (more on this below):

• Updated ColdFusion 8.0.1 ServerMonitorUI.swf
• CFDocument not compatible with TrueType Collection Fonts (TTC) (ColdFusion MX 7, ColdFusion 8)
• Determine Version Information for ColdFusion 8

I couldn't find any HTML page that listed those (and links to them) on any of the following expected pages.

Not on the Hot Fixes page

Curiously, all three offered a link back to the CF 8 Hotfixes page, but they're not technically hotfixes. Anyway, to my point, they're not listed on the hot fixes page.

(I'll say, for those worried most about hot fixes, that all the technotes I saw listed in the "recent feed" that really were hotfixes are indeed listed on the hotfixes page, so it seems that's kept udpated.)

Not on the Tech Notes page(s)

But the above are indeed technotes, and could be important to some, yet they are not listed on the pages that purport to list CF technotes: the CF Support page and the CF Technote Index page have no mention of these. (Indeed, that 2nd technote index page seems quite old, mentioning nothing of CF8 on it.) These are where I'd expect they should be listed, so it seems that these pages are not being kept updated.

And it's not like the technotes above from the recent feeds are really that new. The one on the ServerMonitorUI.swf, for example, is from May. It should be listed on the technotes page by now, shouldn't it?

Or if it's that these pages aren't meant to be the one all-encompassing list of all CF technotes, then what is?

Not found via searching

Just to make sure I wasn't missing some other meta-list of CF technotes, I used the Adobe site search, and even Google and Yahoo, to search for pages referring to the page titles above. I couldn't find any pages that had these listed. I could only find the individual pages themselves (in other words, short of the feed, I'd only find them by searching for them directly).

The problem restated: any solution?

So again my point is: the recent feeds page has technotes that are not offered in any list anywhere else on the Adobe site. Shouldn't a feed supplement a page that otherwise has the info? Does it make sense that if you don't follow the feed, you have no other way of knowing that the page exists (short of lucking out on finding it via a search on the topic)? Some of us would like very much to be able to always find and review a list of all known tech notes. The pages referred to above would seem by most to be expected to do that, but clearly they don't.

And given that the feed only shows 10 entries, the problem gets worse as new entries are added to the feed. What about those who have only just learned of it? How are they to know of items that are just old enough to no longer be listed on the feed?

Maybe someone needs to set up a page that saves the feed data. (There are other pages that show what's coming from the feed, but when the feed changes, they do too.) I'm talking about something that captures the feed output and keeps old entries while adding any that are new. But should we have to do that?

Any way to get the feed to list more than 10?

Finally, in the meantime, since the "recent feed" stops at listing 10 items, does anyone know a way to get it to list more? That would help us to find more that we might otherwise have missed (and would certainly aid in a tool to capture as many as we can).

I tried adding "?entries=20", as a guess, but to no avail.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. 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.

Ever wish you could be notified when there's a new CF technote, hotfix, security bulletin, or DevCenter CF article? You can be, whether via your favorite RSS reader or by email (more below). There are feeds for each of the following:

• CF Technotes and Hotfixes:A feed of recent ColdFusion tech notes and hot fixes is offered here:

  http://rss.adobe.com/www/support/recent/recent_cf.xml

  There is also a top issues feed. (FWIW, the recent_cf.xml page seems identical to the info offered via this URL.)

• DevCenter CF articles: A feed of recent ColdFusion Dev Center articles is offered here:

  http://feeds.feedburner.com/developer_center_coldfusion_tutorials

• CF Security Bulletins: While you can't get a feed of recent ColdFusion security bulletins, you can at least sign up to receive notification of new bulletins by email. Just note that the email will be for all Adobe products which have bulletins, not just for CF.

Don't have an RSS feed reader? Get them by email

If you don't have an RSS feed reader, or you simply prefer to receive such things by email, you can. Check out the various RSS-to-Email tools (all free) which I list in my category, "RSS to Email Tools", in my list of over 100 tools and resources for CFers.

Adobe Feeds for Other Products

If you're interested, you can find many other feeds across all Adobe products at http://www.adobe.com/support/rss/.

Beware of older CF feeds

One last FYI: you may find reference on the web to the following old technote URLs, which do still work but have not been updated since CF 7, such as http://weblogs.macromedia.com/product_feeds/archives/coldfusion/index.rdf and this "ColdFusion news" feed.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. 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.

Today's first category from my Tools and Resources to Consider for CF developers is from the Resources section, and it's "CFML Documentation/Help Tools and Resources".

CFML Documentation/Help Tools and Resources

While the Adobe docs are the best source for CFML documentation, there are online versions of that both from Adobe and others, providing access to the docs in various ways. Please note, though, that while most of the other resources show only the CFML reference, the actual Adobe docs contain more than just the CFML Reference, including a Developer's Guide, Installation Guide, Administration Guide, and more. See the Livedocs for more on those.

• Adobe Livedocs, for CF7
• Adobe Livedocs, for CF8
• CFQuickDocs, by Jacob Munson
• CF Docs on Air, by Brian Love (If not working, try google cache version)
• CFML Docs for IPod, by Randy Nielsen of the Adobe docs team
• CF8 Help files for Eclipse, from Adobe
• ColdFusionDocs, by Anuj Gakhar
• Complete List of CF tags, for 7 and 8, by Andy Jarrett
• Pete Frietag's ColdFusion Cheat Sheet
• I welcome additions/corrections/feedback.

About this series

This entry is part of an ongoing series, sharing each of the 100+ categories and the tools and resources I (and others) have identified. They're designed to answer the questions we hear, like , "does anyone know of tools or resources to help with ...?"

I've decided to start offering each category here as a blog entry, to give the list more exposure and to make sure I'm not missing anything. For now I'm offering each day one list from the resources and then another from the tools categories. To see the list of all categories, see Part 1 of this series. I may in the future offer an RSS feed of any updates made to the list.

I hope people will get great value out of the lists, here or on the tools and resources page. Please try to remember to point the list out to people you see asking for these kind of tools and resources. Thanks.

Additions/Corrections

The tools/resources list is a perpetual work in progress. I definitely welcome additions or corrections to it. If you have any to offer, you can leave them here as a comment on this blog entry and I'll move them to the list on my site.

BTW, before you offer an update here, please do check the category on the real list. I won't be coming back here to update these blog entries to sync them if I add new items to the real list.

Next up later today will be CFML Caching Tools.

Note: This blog post is from 2008. 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.

The following conferences have some, if not an entire, focus on ColdFusion and CFML.

• Adobe Max, organized by Adobe (location varies)
• cf.objective(), organized by Jared Rypka-Hauer, et al (Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, USA)
• CFDevCon, organized by Russ Michaels (London, England)
• CFUnited, organized by Michael Smith et al (Washington, DC, USA)
• Scotch on the Rocks, organized by Andy Allan, et al (Edinburgh, Scotland)
• Spring
  , organized by Dave Hannum, et al (Athens, OH, USA)
• WebDU, organized by Geoff Bowers, et al (Sydney, Australia)
• WebManiacs, organized by Steve Drucker et al (Washington, DC, USA)
• See also Teratech's list of Upcoming CFML conferences

About this series

This entry is part of an ongoing series, sharing each of the 100+ categories and the tools and resources I (and others) have identified. They're designed to answer the questions we hear, like , "does anyone know of tools or resources to help with ...?"

I've decided to start offering each category here as a blog entry, to give the list more exposure and to make sure I'm not missing anything. For now I'm offering each day one list from the resources and then another from the tools categories. To see the list of all categories, see Part 1 of this series. I may in the future offer an RSS feed of any updates made to the list.

I hope people will get great value out of the lists, here or on the tools and resources page.

Additions/Corrections

The tools/resources list is a perpetual work in progress. I definitely welcome additions or corrections to it. If you have any to offer, you can leave them here as a comment on this blog entry and I'll move them to the list on my site.

BTW, before you offer an update here, please do check the category on the real list. I won't be coming back here to update these blog entries to sync them if I add new items to the real list.

Next up later today will be CFMAIL Replacements/Enhancements.