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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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

For years, experienced developers have recommended client-side proxy tools like Firebug, Fiddler, Charles, and such. I list these and many others as a category in my CF411 site listing over 1800 tools and resources for CFers, in the category, HTTP Debugging Proxies/Sniffers/Web Client Test Tool.

I recently updated the list, though, to point out these "built-in" forms of these tools, now available in most browsers. If you may be in a place where you are "not allowed" to install new software (or are simply disinclined), knowing that the browser may have such a valuable tool built-in can be a real discovery, thus this entry.

Here's the content that I've added to that section:

• In Chrome, see the Dev Tools, available under the "Customize and control Google Chrome" icon at the top right (the monkey wrench), then Tools>Developer Tools.
• In Firefox 6 and above, see the "Web Console" feature in the "Web Developer" tools, available under the Tools menu.
• In Internet Explorer, see the Developer Toolbar which is an ad-on for IE 6 and 7, and the f12 Developer Tools that are built into IE 8 and 9 (in the Tools menu).
• In Opera, see the Developer Tools in Opera DragonFly, available in the Edit>Developer Tools menu in Windows, and Tools>Advanced on Mac.
• In Safari, see the "Web Inspector" feature of the Develop menu.
• I welcome additions/corrections/feedback.

The links I've given for each of these often have friendly introductions to using such tools. I can also commend an old but classic discussion of such tools, here.

Have you used these sort of tools? How have they helped you. Are you surprised to learn that the browsers now have such tools built-in? Chime in and share your thoughts. I may do a later blog entry or talk introducing using these tools for some common problems working with CF.

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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

I've not yet seen anyone try to create an ultimate list of *all* the new features in CF10, so here's my shot at it. (This is based on the public beta. I will update it soon with info from the final release.) Of course many (including Adobe) have created lists that show perhaps a couple dozen of what they think may be the most prominent features, or the most interesting for them, etc. I've just not yet seen anyone list even simply all the features mentioned in the beta new features guide. That's what I'm doing here.

But to be clear, I am not listing every new tag and function (that would be tedious.) Instead, I'm listing them as concepts, and where warranted, any relevant subtopics that expand on the new feature.

I've got more to say about the list (how I created it basically from the 244-page CF10 new feature docs, and what you can do to help expand it). But some will want me to cut to the chase, so here's the list. Please check out the additional discussion after it.

Charlie's Ultimate List of new CF10 Features, revision 1.9 (Sep 12 2012), listing 217 items¹

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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.

With a title like Beginner's Guide, one may wonder what to expect. As a contributor myself to several CF books (carehart.org/contact.cfm#books), I appreciate the challenge in deciding the intended audience for a book, and keeping it in mind as we are writing. And having been a co-contributor on now 10 multi-author books (not all on CF), I appreciate the challenge in keeping a consistent voice among all those authors throughout a book, as well as each keeping that intended audience front and center. It's not easy, although it can be aided greatly by careful editorial control and editing.

What to expect from the book?

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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.

You can find the recording here. Note that you need to login with an Adobe ID, just like when you download Adobe software or participate in their forums. (I have no control over that.)

Since that link just goes right to the recording, here is the description I'd used for the session, to help decide if the recording may interest you. BTW, I clarify on the session that FR is useful for more than just ColdFusion, in that FusionReactor can be used for Railo, BlueDragon, and OpenBlueDragon, as well as in fact any Java server (Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, Glassfish, Websphere, etc.), and the session applies just as well to folks using those.

My session: Monitoring ColdFusion with FusionReactor

Recording
Session Description:

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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.

Yet people will reasonably want to be able to have some mechanism that "watches" CF "from the outside", to know when it's gone down. How can you do that? That's what I'll point out in this entry.

And beyond talking about what goes along with the CF Enterprise Server Monitor, I'll also point out options for those who are NOT running CF 8, 9, or 10 Enterprise and therefore do not have the Enterprise Server Monitor. This also includes those CF 6 or 7. There are solutions for you, and also for those running Lucee, Railo, BD, or indeed any Java server. More on all that in a moment.

This is part 4 of an unexpected series of entries today on the CF Enterprise Server Monitor. :-) I got on a roll, and each seemed deserving of its own topic. See the "Related Blog Entries" below this entry for links to those.

What the CF Server Monitor is, and is not

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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.

BTW, today is "more about the CF Server Monitor" day today here at carehart.org. :-) In my last two entries today, I talked about related matters, regarding the impact of the 3 "start" buttons (monitoring, profiling, and memory tracking), as a followup to an older entry I did on them when the monitor came out with CF 8 in 2007. See the "related blog entries" below for more.

In the last entry, I mentioned that in 9.0.1, Adobe added a new "Monitoring Settings" page to the CF Admin, and one of the features is that ability I discussed to turn off the 3 start buttons from within the Admin.

Below that is this other feature, labeled "Enable Monitoring Server". Let me say first that has really have nothing to do with all the discussion of the "start" buttons in the previous entries.

So what does "Enabling Monitor Server" do?

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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.

But the CF Server Monitor does have an Achilles Heel: you may turn on one of its "start" buttons, especially "memory tracking", and find that it's crippling your server. You may not be able to then turn off the feature.

I talked about this potential issue in an entry when CF 8 was released back in 2007, CF Server Monitor: what's the impact on production? you may be surprised. I clarify there that the monitor will not, as some assert, "always kill your server". See that for more details.

And I discussed in an entry earlier today that you can't just "close the monitor" or even restart CF to make the problem go away, because that won't stop the functionality. See CF911: Using the #ColdFusion Server Monitor? Be aware that the "Start" buttons remain enabled.

So what if you are in a situation where using one of the features, especially typically "memory tracking", has in fact sent your server into a tizzy. If you can't even get into the monitor to turn it off, you're going to be in quite a pickle, and understandably panicked.

Easy solution if you're on CF 9.0.1

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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.

Why is this important? Well, I discussed the impact of these buttons (which can be severe or negligible, depending on certain factors) in a blog entry I wrote back in 2007 when CF8 was released.

And today someone was kind enough to point it out to someone on Twitter, so I took a look at it and tweaked it a bit to give some more context. While doing that, I realized I'd never mentioned this fact about the "start" buttons, and about an important related change in CF 9.01 (and 10), thus this entry.

The buttons remain enabled over CF restart or closing the monitor

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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.

Among the "other enhancements" mentioned at the bottom of the "New Features Notes" (PDF), note a few related to FTP:

• New Upload On Save option on the FTP connector dialog box to upload a file by way of FTP when saved locally
• Use shortcuts to perform Synchronize and Upload (Ctrl+Alt+W U)/Download (Ctrl+Alt+W D) simultaneously
• Take advantage of the shortcut for Synchronize (Ctrl+Alt+W Y)

Those may be big news for some, which might be easily missed, and which are not likely to be pointed out in most posts on what's new in CFB 2.0.1. And some would even intentionally leave them out, so I'm "takin' one for the community" here by pointing these out. :-)

Why some may decry these features

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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.

(This is a reprisal and update of an old blog entry I'd done back in 2003, on a blog site that will soon no longer exist. I'll be reprising a few such blog entries in coming days/weeks, to keep them around for posterity [and to save some having to dig for them in the archive.org site] since often the info offered then may be just as valuable now. I hope that in time these new versions would come up if people do searches that would have found the old entry.)

So, about these http headers, while CFML exposes them in a dump of the CGI scope, such as the user-agent field which shows up as cgi.http_user_agent, the issue is that you would not use that name, nor even "user_agent", when specifying it in a CFHTTPPARAM. The proper way to pass the user agent in a CFHTTPPARAM would be as follows:

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