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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Here's good news for folks seeking more documentation on how to configure, use, and troubleshoot the ColdFusion Builder debugger.

My chapter on the topic, in the newly released CF 9 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 2 Application development is available free online. It's one of 3 chapters at the end of the book (out of 21 total) that were forced online due to pagecount restrictions.

While it's a bummer for those who buy the print book and may not notice these are missing (though it should be mentioned in the TOC), the good news is that it means anyone can read the chapter.

You'll find the 25-page chapter (chapter 45, "Using the Debugger") online in a PDF.

(Update: It was previously offered as one of 3 chapters available at Ben's site. The link I had long used, (forta.com/books/0321679199/CFWACK9-2-echapters.pdf) no longer works, so I created my own version of it for posterity.)

Finally, some may notice on the Amazon page offered above that only Ben Forta is listed as author for the book. Of course, there were multiple authors. Ben, Ray Camden, and I were contributors to all 3 volumes, while there were still other contributors for volumes 2 and 3. Ben says that this oversight will be addressed soon.

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

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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.

It always feels a little awkward pointing things like this out, but since some readers may want to know about them, I have recently been the subject of a few of what I'll call "appearances" (and I have a few more coming up):

• I was a roundtable participant in last week's RiaPodcast episode 2.9 (you can listen there)
• I was co-host on the CFHour() podcast, show #60 a couple of weeks ago (you can listen there)
• I was invited (along with Michael Smith) to be interviewed by Judith Dinowitz of FusionAuthority on the recently announced fact that this would be the last year of CFUnited, which I've spoken at each year. (You can read the interview at the FA link offered.)
• It was announced last week that I'll be hosting a BOF (birds of a feather) session at the CFUnited conference. The session will be "CF911: Server Troubleshooting". More details at the page above.
• It was announced last week as well that I will be giving another session at CFUnited, this one being the Sponsor talk for Intergral (makers of FusionReactor, with whom I partner a lot). The topic is "Continuously Improve CF Code Quality, Server Availability & Application Stability". More details here.
• Finally, more details about my Day 2 keynote at the conference were also announced a couple of weeks ago. The topic will be, "CFCommunity: You're Never Alone". More details at the link offered.

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.

If you've been following my blog here for CFMeetup meeting announcements, please note that I will no longer do them. It's simply redundant, as there are four other ways to get notified.

You can still get CFMeetup announcements the following ways:

• Via email: by signing up at the meetup site to receive email notification (use the "join us" button on the site, to become a member of the group, for free)
• Via RSS: by following the RSS feed for the group's calendar, offered at the bottom of the calendar page on the site
• Via twitter: by follow us on twitter (@cfmeetup, used pretty much only for announcements)
• Via an alternate RSS feed: by following the RSS feed on the Adobe group for CFmeetup, which simply echoes the meetup calendar feed above. The Adobe group isn't used for much other than that, for now

Can't access meetup.com? We've got you covered

The latter two options are offered especially for those who can't access the meetup.com domain (coldfusionmeetup.com redirects to our specific page in meetup.com). Some workplaces block access to meetup.com, as a social media site.

4 ways should be enough, right?

But with those 4 ways, we should have everyone covered who wants to get announcements.

(For those who like getting email notice but can't sign up for meetup.com and don't like RSS, note that there are tools that can send RSS notices by email. See a category of such tools offered at my CF411 site. There are also ways to get email notifications of twitter messages, but that landscape's changing too fast for me to yet have created a list of such tools.)

All that said, I will mention while I'm here that we do have a CFMeetup today (July 1, at noon ET), with Ray Camden speaking on Building CFBuilder Extensions. For future announcements, please follow one of the alternatives above.

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.

Are you still suffering from spam or junk mail in your email inbox? If you're using Outlook or Thunderbird, you should consider CloudMark, a service I've used for years. I'd like to share a bit about it, for those who may benefit.

Before proceeding though, let me say that I realize there are many spam solutions, including ones based on your mail server instead (that you or your host might implement).

And yes, of course I do realize that folks using Gmail will want to say that they never have to worry about this at all!

Let me please just speak to those who do choose to (or have to) receive email from other mail servers, and perhaps can't control spam handling on the server, or still favor a client solution.

Background

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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.

Someone on a list asked an interesting question: how do you switch perspectives in CFBuilder (or FlashBuilder or Eclipse) from the command line? For instance, if one has CFB with FB as a plugin, how might one use the command line to create a shortcut so as to launch to the CFB or FB (or another) perspective?

The good news is that there are in fact various command-line switches for launching Eclipse, and these apply just as well to the cfbuilder.exe and FlashBuilder.exe (for instance, some have needed to use the -clean switch to resolve some problems).

In this case of specifying the desired perspective, we want to use the -perspective argument. The trick, though, is knowing the right value to provide. It's *not* the perspective name. Rather, it's the perspectiveid, and that's not so easy to determine. I'll explain below how I found them, but to cut to the chase, here they are.

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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.

Did you know CF's being used by Dell, TomTom, BestBuy and others? Well, it is, but through a service they license, but for public-facing parts of their sites, so it's indeed worth noting.

I had noticed today that Budd Wright from PelcoSolutions (aka DVS Interactive) blogged this weekend that "BestBuy Uses ColdFusion". That certainly caught my eye (heck, I was in the store just yesterday.)

Just the BestBuy "trade-in" site, but more than meets the eye

As I read it and saw it was about their trade-in site, I thought, "well, some may bemoan that it's 'just a subsite'", and therefore may not find it quite as compelling as if it were the main site. That may be so.

But on closer examination I found something that is indeed still more compelling. What BestBuy is using (that uses CF) is really a licensed service from dealtree.com. And if one looks at that page (where DealTree lists others using their service), we see that indeed it's used also by Dell, TomTom, Sharp, Buy.com, Gateway, Casio, Ebay, and others. So this is about more than just BestBuy! :-)

These other companies (Dell, TomTom, etc.) would have high expectations

They all certainly wouldn't have chosen if if it wasn't suitable to the task, and you'd think someone higher up in each company had to clear it, since trade-in processing is pretty public-facing (both in-store and online).

Perhaps we can hope it may raise the profile of CF within the companies (though really, it's probably just seen as a utility to most, SAAS that just works, so that may be too much to hope for.)

Still, since these are companies which will require fast response in both the in-store and online sites, it's certainly a nice set of examples of e-commerce CF use that we can point to, so thanks for sharing, Budd.

I figured this was all a little much to put in his blog as a comment. :-) Plus I thought that my blogging it separately might be a nice way to give his entry a little more "link juice" in the search engines. :-)

Who else is using CF?

I'm adding this after a couple of comments below, of people noting other sites using CF. I didn't think to mention it when I wrote this but I do keep a list of resources helping people who may wonder what other sites run CF. It's one of the 125+ categories in my CF411 site:

CFML-Powered Web Sites (who's using CFML?)

To be clear, I'm not keeping a list. Instead, I point there to many sites that do keep such lists.

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.

I wanted to add some more thoughts to Adam Tuttle's helpful recent entry, Why (I Think) You Should Buy ColdFusion Builder. I started to offer them as comments but it got lengthy, so I decided to create this entry instead.

A little background on the question

Adam's entry was his response to an observation I'd made on a private mailing list that I'd not seen any good single resource to point people to when they raised concerns about having to pay for CFBuilder. We who have "seen the light" wonder why people even debate it (as he addresses with observations from others in his entry).

While his entry expands on the oft-shared Adobe graphic comparing features among it and the existing CFML editors, there are some more features that may not have been t important enough to be listed on that graphic, but are sometimes a source of concern/contention for some as they consider CFB. Here are a few of them.

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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.

Some time ago I implemented some code on my own site to throttle when any single IP address (bot, spider, hacker, user) made too many requests at once. I've mentioned it occasionally and people have often asked me to share it, which I've happily done by email. Today with another request I decided to post it and of course seek any feedback.

It's a first cut. While there are couple of concerns that will come to mind for some readers, and I try to address those at the end, it does work for me and has helped improve my server's stability and reliability, and it's been used by many others.

Update in 2020: I have changed the 503 status code below to 429, as that has become the norm for such throttles. I had acknowledged it as an option originally. I just want to change it now, in case someone just grabs the code and doesn't read it all or the comments. Speaking of comments, do see the discussion below with thoughts from others, especially from James Moberg who created his own variant addressing some concerns, as offered on github, and the conversation that followed about that, including yet another later variant.

Update in 2021: Rather than use my code, perhaps you would rather have this throttling done by your web server or another proxy. It is now a feature offered in IIS, Apache, and others. I discuss those in a new section below.

Background: do you need to care about throttling? Perhaps more than you realize

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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.

Folks know that I like to share news of tools (see my CF411 site), but I want to point out here a couple of free ones in particular that may address problems people are having in new/modern configurations: one is a tool for monitoring a SAN, and the other is for monitoring VMs.

It also gives me a chance to offer some props for the site of the company behind the tools, SolarWinds, which again many may find valuable in educating not only about the tools but the topics that the tools help with.

The free SAN and VM monitoring tools

The two tools (and one more for bonus) are:

• SolarWinds Free SAN Monitor - keep a close eye on the performance & capacity of your storage arrays and become a storage superhero!
  Note also:
  • Intro video
  • Or step up to their commercial Storage Profiler - Multi-Vendor Storage Performance Monitoring
• VM Monitor - continuously monitor a VMware® ESX Server and its virtual machines with at-a-glance virtualization health statistic
  Note also:
  • Intro video
• WMI Monitor - monitor your Windows® apps and servers in real time, using built-in, community-sourced, and customizable application templates!
  Note also:
  • Intro video

I haven't yet used them myself, so this isn't so much a recommendation of the tools but rather a recommendation that you consider them if you are interested in what they have to offer.

The company offers still more free tools, as well commercial ones of course.

A company that gets how to educate you about their products

You may have noticed above that I offered as well links to videos about each product. SolarWinds has really done a great job offering educational resources, especially videos, and organizing them into categories such as tech talks, webcasts, and more.

Indeed, if you may be new to network management (which can be a broad and/or deep subject, appealing variously to generalist IT geeks and hard-core network admins), they offer lots of compelling introductory resources, including their geek guides and even certification training . Of course they also have a helpful blog and twitter feed.

Just as I previously praised the Mura folks as a "company who got it right" in terms of setting up a compelling, informative web site for IT folks, I really have to say the same for the SolarWinds folks. Congrats, and thanks.