With all the recent updates to CF (and the ongoing need to keep up and related things up-to-date), I wanted to share some news: I've long had on my site a meta resource page regarding keeping ColdFusion updated, where I offered both links and tips related to updating CF as well as the JVM underlying CF, the web server connector(wsconfig), the CF PMT, FusionReactor, CF Builder (old Eclipse and new VSCode versions) and even Lucee.

It's been on my site as my "CFUpdate" page (linked to from my old-school top-level nav bar), and I've kept the page updated. [Hey, updating my meta resource on updates. That's SO meta!]

But I suspect a lot of people may never find it for one reason or another, so I wanted to offer a link to it here.

Check it out, and I welcome comments or feedback here.

Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

With the passing of each year it's good to look back and highlight some of the most interesting posts of the previous year. These aren't in order by any metric, they're just in an order I think may interest most readers.

The first several are in fact resource lists where I pulled together resources, to help people in addressing some specific topic/challenge, which is something I enjoy doing as a contribution to the community. Sometimes the posts are related to the consulting work I do, but not always (just like some of the conference presentations I do, which are nearly always about CF, but not always about CF troubleshooting).

You'll see also a couple of posts that point to resources where I've been contributing time and content elsewhere (taking away somewhat from my posting things here). First, I've done about a dozen blog posts on the new Adobe CF Community Portal. Second, I've done about a dozen webinars for the FusionReactor folks. I've debated posting each one of those here as I did them (as blog posts here, I mean, throughout the year), but for now I had instead just opted to create a post for each of them last year listing what all I'd done.

Enjoy.

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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

Often in my role as an independent consultant providing ColdFusion server troubleshooting services, I find myself helping folks determine whether or that a problem is in their database.

And though it may surprise many, I generally do not find the problem to be very often with the SQL they are running. More often it's about configuration issues. For instance, it may be that they have not been keeping their indexes or statistics updated, or it may be that they need indexes that they don't have, or have too many that they don't really need. Or it may be that they have not done any tuning at all and the default settings for their database server are not be well suited to them.

And though such problems are common to any database server (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on), I find that an awful lot of my clients (for whatever reason) do run on Windows and do use SQL Server (and that doesn't make them stupid or lazy. Different strokes for different folks).

So in this post I want to focus on some SQL Server resources, related to such matters, which I find that I refer folks to often. Some are blog posts, some are code you can run, and some are tools (mostly free).

People using other DBs would do well to read along and could find corresponding resources/tools for the same problems in their respective DB servers.

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Note: This blog post is from 2015. 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 wondered where you can find more about ColdFusion's mobile development features? (Did you know that CF11 had added such features?) There are several resources provided by Adobe and others. In this post I highlight those various resources, with a focus on the many (and many kinds of) Adobe-provided ones.

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Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.

While helping people with various problems in my CF server troubleshooting services, I often have the chance to help people identify security vulnerabilities, especially in their configuration of CF and/or their web server, and sometimes related to their code.

I was wanting to point out to someone the various ColdFusion security resources, and while I have a category on them in my CF411 site, I thought this was a list worth pulling out into its own blog entry and expanding a bit.

You may be surprised to find that there are more to CF security guidelines than just the venerable server "lockdown guide" (for those administering and configuring CF, the OS, and the web server, among other things).

Did you know that there have been "developer security guidelines" as well, focused instead on coding? This latter guide has gone through three iterations, including just recently, as I'll discuss along with the lockdown guides, below.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. 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 struggling with using the XML features in CFML? Or do you help people who are?

It's not something most people use often, and there is far more to the feature set than meets the eye. If you don't use the right resources to help you, you could waste time trying to piece together a solution using only scant examples you may find.

In this entry, I'll point to several resources you should consider to help get you quickly up to speed in using--and appreciating--the power of the XML features in CFML.

Even if you don't need them today, you (or someone you know) may need them some day, so keep this in mind. (Or if you find this page doing a google search some years down the road, drop a note to let me know if it helped then!)

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.

Following on the heels of my "Ultimate Var Scope Resource list" last week, here now I present what I think is the ultimate list of CF debugging output template alternatives.

Yes, you CAN modify the debugging output. Some have even done it for you

Many may not realize that the CF debugging output (optionally displayed at the bottom of the page, as enabled in the CF Admin) is actually created by a CFML template that can be modified ([cf]\wwwroot\WEB-INF\debug\classic.cfm).

Fortunately, several people have offered various resources that explain how to work with this file and offer packaged alternatives with specific features to resolve particular problems (where people wish the debugging output did more, or could be seen differently than at the bottom of the page).

Just drop and reload

You can just drop any of these files into the debug file directory to add to or replace the default file. If it's a new file you then need to select it as an alternative in the CF Admin Debugging Output page which offers a choice for "Select Debugging Output Format", which points to the classic.cfm by default.

Of course, since it's CFML source code, all the options mentioned here are free and open source.

The alternatives, discussed and downloadable

The alternatives include:

• "Another hack job", from Ray Camden, adding total query time, improved number formatting for individual query times, and highlighting queries that a given duration
• ColdFire, open source from Nathan Mische et al, a Firefox/Firebug extension to aid in viewing CFML debugging output by way of a new alternative debugging output template, coldfire.cfm
• ColdFusion Debug Templates, "in case you want to try something different than the default template", from Josh Knutson
• Debug2FusionReactor, from Intergral, for showing CF debugging output in FR Marker tab
• Improved Classic CF debugging template, from Aaron Longnion. Changes list of templates executed to show in order executed, rather than by order of duration. Also adds cfqueryparam variable values for queries shown.
• StarFish, from Ray Camden, a profiling tool built on the CF debugger. Stores debugging output in server scope, and adds an Admin customization interface to view reports based on gathered information.
• Stiletto, from John Mason, for logging CF debugging output to a file (inspired by a blog entry by Bilal Soylu
• Zoid, from Ray Camden. Changes the table of templates executed from a summary for each (even if called multiple times) to in individual display of each, in order.
• Note as well that another alternative to showing debugging output at the bottom of the page is a built-in option in CF. Note the available "dockable" option in the choice for "Select Debugging Output Format". While the aforementioned classic.cfm is the default, the dockable.cfm instead shows the debugging output as dockable/movable/floatable pane instead.

Also listed on my CF411 site

Note as well that I have just created a section in my CF411 site, called "CFML Debugging Output Template Alternatives/Mods". If anyone offers me additions or corrections as a comment below, I'll be sure to update the list in the CF411 page as well.

Finally, as I mention at the bottom of the list on that page, note that I have yet another section (following that one) on the site, called CFML Debugging Tools, which lists still other kinds of CFML debugging tools.

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.

Do you know what the "var scope problem" is, and how pernicious it can be in causing very subtle bugs that can cause errors that are VERY hard to understand? I list here several resources to help you understand the issue. Some help plainly explain what the issue is, including even a live demo.

I also discuss below the key varscoper tool which you will want to use to help assess and indeed correct your own code.

(Update in 2022, 2019: while the many resources are indeed all quite old now, they all still apply, and most still exist. Where needed, I recovered them from the good ol' archive.org, an awesome resource for finding old content, as I've written about before.)

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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.

Someone asked me about migrating from CF 6 to 8, lamenting that he couldn't find any migration resources. Sadly, there are no official Adobe resources for upgrading to CF8, but I will mention a guide to upgrading to CF 7 from CF 6 (or even 5) that Macromedia offered, which many may have missed. I'll also point out a couple other things and blog entries of others that do focus more on moving to CF 8 specifically (and perhaps others will comment with still more.)

Who's only now moving to CF 8, you ask?

Some may ask, "why would someone be moving to CF 8 now, which CF9 on the horizon?". Well, a lot of shops don't upgrade immediately, so the question didn't surprise me. So some may only now be moving to 8, and they may not be interested in moving to CF9 for a while. Heck, some (like him) are running only on CF 6, or earlier! Let's just be glad when they people do finally migrate. :-)

And who knows, there may be some who move to CF 9 from 6 or 7, and this info may help them down the road, too.

So, as Casey Kasem used to say, "on with the countdown". :-)

60 page "Migrating Applications to ColdFusion MX 7"

I first pointed out to him that there *was* in fact available in the past an official Macromedia CF document (in the CF7 docs):

Migrating Applications to ColdFusion MX 7 (PDF)

At 60 pages, this is quite a good resource to consider. It "describes migration and known compatibility issues between ColdFusion Server 5 and later versions, including ColdFusion MX 6.1 and ColdFusion MX 7."

Sadly, it was not updated for CF 8, but really, the bigger differences in things were between 6 (being the first release after the rewrite of CF on java) and higher. Of course, those moving from 5 (when CF was written in C++) to higher face far more differences. Again, the guide even covers that. So even those skipping 7 to go to 8 should at least look at the guide.

Never heard of the guide? I'm not surprised. I'll take that up at the end of this entry.

Jim Priest Sought CF8 Migration Stories

Now, he did ask about migration to CF8 specifically.

There was at least one blog entry, from Jim Priest, that sought such CF 8 migration stories.

In the comments, someone commented about "CF8 performance on our CFC-driven apps" after the upgrade to 8. As many now know, that was likely due to a bug in the JVM, rather than CF. CF 8 came running on on JVM 1.6.0_04. Early in the CF8 lifetime, people suggested dropping back to JVM 1.5, but by late 2008 Sun had fixed the problem in 1.6.0_10, and that became the recommendation. Many blogged about it, including Sean Corfield and Ryan Stille who also walks you through making the upgrade.

Someone also commented (in Jim's CF8 Migration Stories entry) about losing their CFIDE directory after the upgrade. I don't know if this is the exact problem, but there was a similar issue documented in the CF 7 timeframe: "CFIDE and cfdocs folders removed after migrating from ColdFusion MX 6.1 to ColdFusion MX 7".

Jim's entry has comments closed for now, so I can only offer these thoughts here. I just asked him by email if he may reopen it to let people post observations like these, to help people who may yet find it and the older comments. We shall see.

Josh Adams offers still more resources

I just found also that Josh Adams (of Adobe) also blogged about Migrating from ColdFusion 5 or older to ColdFusion 8. He shares some other interesting resources, though not that CF7 migration guide. I'll drop him a note and I suspect he'll get that added ASAP. :-)

Steven Erat's discussion of migration from 4.5 to 7

Again, while not specifically about moving to CF 8, Steven Erat did blog some resources to help someone making the move from 4.5 to 7, in his entry, Migrating applications across a six year gap in ColdFusion server implementation. That offers a link to the Migration Guide above but also release notes for each release between 4.5 and 7.02, which is a nice touch.

Don't forget to apply hotfixes

Besides looking at the release notes for each release (something I also highly recommend), I'll also remind folks to also always check for updates, hotfixes, and cumulative hotfixes for any release you may install. What you download (even today from Adobe) may not be the absolute latest version of whatever release you get.

I'll do a blog entry about that with more details in the future. (I did discuss it in my CFMythbusters talk, and the PDF there has some good pointers to get you started on this topic, among others.)

No surprise if you never noticed that CF7 Migration Guide

Sadly, you won't find that CF7 Migration Guide I mentioned on the CF7 livedocs page, since it's a PDF (never made as an HTML file, which the livedocs are). Instead, it's listed on a different CF7 documentation page, that can itself be easily missed. (It is linked to from the CF product and support pages.)

And again the Migration Guide wasn't updated for CF8, so of course it's not mentioned on either the CF8 equivalent of that page or the CF8 livedocs page. Still, since the "changes" from 7 to 8 weren't substantial (new features, not many--if any--breaking changes), the guide helps those moving from CF 5 or 6 to 8, too.

Some won't want to miss the substantial Getting Started Guide

Finally, while we're mentioning CF7 docs that people may have missed, check out also "Getting Started Building ColdFusion MX Applications". That is/was at least listed in the CF7 livedocs (and the other doc link), above. Still, it seems many missed it. It's over 150 pages of great introduction to CF application development (and yes, it shows use of CFCs not just tired old CFQUERY/CFOUTPUT development). Sadly, it too was not upgraded for CF 8 (or 9). It was a great resource for those getting started with CF. I still recommend it all the time.

What other CF 8 Migration resources exist?

So that's my "quick" answer to the person asking for CF8 migration resources. Anyone have more? Whether moving to 8 from 7, or 6, or earlier? :-) Comment here. Readers will be grateful.

I'll prime the pump with a couple more, where people described challenges they faces:

• My ColdFusion 8 Upgrade, by Barney Boisvert
• Upgrading To ColdFusion 8 From ColdFusion MX 7, by Marcelo Lewin

Hope that's helpful. And since I give a nod to Casey Kasem at the opening, I suppose some will think I should mimic his successor, Ryan Seacrest, in closing here. This is "Arehart, out". :-)

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.

I happened upon a site today with many quick, to the point, highly graphical articles introducing web app development topics that may interest some of my readers. Wanted to pass them along:

• How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression
• How To Optimize Your Site With HTTP Caching
• How To Debug Web Applications With Firefox
• Using JSON to Exchange Data
• How To Make a Bookmarklet For Your Web Application
• The Quick Guide to GUIDs

A few focus on Javascript and/or site building:

• Speed Up Your Javascript Load Time
• Speed Up Your Javascript, Part 2: Downloadable Examples!
• A Simple, Comprehensive Overview of Javascript

Still others aren't specific to web development, but can be valuable to all kinds of developers, and it was one of these that led me to the site in the first place:

• A Visual Guide to Version Control
• Intro to Distributed Version Control (Illustrated)
• Keeping your data backed up

The site is Better Explained, whose tag line is "Explanations for everyone". The author does a pretty good job of that. Some of the topics are a little too one-sided (the discussion of HTTP compression does only show setting it up in Apache, not IIS), and of course there's no mention of CF anywhere. :-) But we can't expect that from everyone. There are lots of positive comments and linkbacks on on many of the entries, so he'd done a good job in the eyes of most.

Indeed, if you may be hearing the siren call of Ruby on Rails, they have an article on that: Starting Ruby on Rails: What I Wish I Knew. There's also an intro to MVC, but again it's from a Rails perspective: Intermediate Rails: Understanding Models, Views and Controllers.

If there's something you'd like to see the author address on the site, he has a post for that, too: What do you want Better Explained?.