Hi all,

Recently saw this article writen by a FF developer about whats been done by Mozilla to improve Firefox 3 and runs through some comparison tests with other browsers, accompanied by some pretty graphs.

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

Check out Mark’s blog(well Learnosity’s) for a comparison of SOAP and REST for ColdFusion MX, again accompanied b pretty charts!

http://www.learnosity.com/techblog/index.cfm/2008/3/13/CFMX–SOAP-vs-REST-benchmarks

Came across a nice plugin to visualise images in Firefox – check out http://piclens.com/site/firefox/win/ I really like it.

I’ve signed up for the beta of SearchMe, it sounds good in theory but will be interested to try it. Have a look at the video demo here
www.searchme.com

And finally what made my week. The work of Jeff Orkin’s on the topic of Goal Oriented Action Planning inspired my Masters and he has referenced my Master’s thesis from his MIT Media site, check out his publications(and games, they rock) http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html

Hi again,

Been a while since my last post so quite a bit to post, will probably split into two.

I was having a very strange problem in CF last week where CF was unable to find any Application.cfc of any of my sites. I did many updateapps, restarted ColdFusion a couple of times, ensured the relative paths were correct and there were no errors in the cfc. After reaching my wits end with it, I asked a co-worker(cheers Sharmo!) for his assistance. We checked the logs and a whole bunch of other things with no avail to figure out what was going wrong. Michael then explained how cfcs are converted into Java bytecode classes in the backend so we figured that there could be something funky going on with the caching in the backend or on of the classes had become corrupt. So we deleted all the classes from /Applications/JRun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfclasses and did a restart of ColdFusion and voila…all working again.

I’ve been performing a lot of exception checking for ColdFusion of late. There are several different types of ColdFusion error listed below. Some exceptions CAN contain exception specific data thrown along with the error. Every exception contains a message and a type(i.e. database, application etc. ). Each exception can also include two members of the cfcatch struct called rootCause and cause which include data that can explain the reason behind the exception.

Database – Mysql errors
Special variables

* cfcatch.rootcause.datasource : the SQL datasource
* cfcatch.rootcause.sql : the problematic sql code

Application – Errors in the application scope

Special variables

* cfcatch.extendedInfo : exactly what it says on the tin

Template – Occurs when a template which is included can’t be found

Special variables

* cfcatch.missingfileName : The name of the missing template

Security – Occurs with ColdFusion sandbox and other security exceptions

Special variables

* Couldn’t find any in specific but I’m sure there are, had some sandbox setup issues

MissingInclude – Thrown when a CF resource isn’t found when using cfinclude, cfmodule

Special variables

* cfcatch.misingFilename : The missing include filename

Lock – Exceptions which occur when failed locking operations occur.

Special variables

* cfcatch.lockName : the name of the lock that failed
* cfcatch.lockOperation : the type of lock operation that failed(timeout, mutex or unknown)

Object – Object exceptions, occur when an operation is performed on an object or something invalid is done with an object

Special variables

* Nothing special

Expression – Exceptions thrown by invalid CF expressions

Special variables

* cfcatch.errNumber : The expression error number

Any – Other errors including custom errors, search engine errors and other Java exceptions not caught by CF.

I’m sure there more but this is what I found from testing. You can find Adobe’s (rather poor) explanation of the CF8 exceptions here

I recently had the need to disable ColdFusion passwords for both the Administrator and the Sandbox security sections of the CF backend. The best way to do this is to directly modify the security xml file that ColdFusion reads in. On the Mac I’m working on this security file was located in /Applications/JRun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib/neo-security.xml

Alter the end of this file and there are a few booleans there that be set to disable sandbox security, disable admin security, disable rds security and set the admin user name(I believe thats what the final entry is, I haven’t looked into it)

admin

Hi again,

I’ve been delving into the wonderful world of Farcry CMS. I needed to create a custom type and having never created one before didn’t really know where to start. Luckily for me I’m working with one of the ex-developers of Farcry Michael and he stepped me through how to create it. This process is for the latest beta version of Farcry 5 so may be different for other versions of the CMS.

First and foremost you need to need to create a new type cfc in you /webroot/farcry/projects/#projectName#/packages/types directory. I created a CFC called Products(although I think you may be better of leaving it all lower case, more on that later) which contains several properties. The properties contained in this CFC define what is to be contained in the request stObj whenever someone hits/calls the new types page. The products cfc extends the farcry core types cfc and so inherits all the generic stuff like status verison, object id etc properties that are common across all farcry objects. Next I began to include my own custom ’stuff’ that I want specific to that object. I created a title, display method and product type. The title is just a string and the display method goes off and creates a drop down list of all objects in the products directory in the webskin that begin with ‘displayPage’, again more on that later. The product type is a list of allowed types of products. I specified this as a string but it can easily be replaced by a query or you can pull in other Farcry objects. Finally we need an edit function that tells farcry where to look when editing the object in the back-end. I specified that farcry should look in the _Products directory and for edit.cfm. So whenever we are editing an object in the back end Farcry will load up edit.cfm and this page essentially becomes a regular form style page with a little difference as you need to save the changes back to the Farcry object & DB when completed.

The edit.cfm is quite long but I’ve edited it a bit and included it anyway.

	
	

	
	













	
	
	



	
	
	
	
 	
	
	
		 

	
	
		
		
		
		

		
		
			
			
			
			
			
			
			
			
			

		
			
		

	
		
		
#errormessage#


	



	
	

	
	








#application.rb.getResource("generalInfo")#: #stObj.title#

		#application.rb.getResource("titleLabel")#

		

		
		

		Product Type:

 selected="selected">#iProduct#


			


		
	



	

Now you’ve created your products.cfc log into the farcry backend and go to the Admin tab. Select COAPI management from the dropdown and then select types on the left hand nav. You should now see your newly created products object here ready to be deployed. You can select deploy and your products should be available in the backend. However you need to do one more thing before you can begin to create products in the backend and view them on the front end, you need to define how products are to be displayed on the front end. To do this create a products directory in the /webroot/farcry/products/#appName#/webskin/ and within this create a page called displayPageStandard. Whenever this page is called the stObj struct is passed into the page and you can now access all the properties of this specific product and display it as you wish. So within this page I just dumped the stObj and then created a simple table of the object title and type. Obviously you can do much more complex stuff than this but this is really just a tutorial on how to do it.

Now you should be able to create product objects select a display method and edit them according to your own custom edit.cfm. One problem I never encountered on my Mac but did in staging was that I had created the products cfc with a large “P” and had use the same casing everywhere around the project. No problem there but in staging an error occurred saying that the table ‘products’ couldn’t be found. Looks like Farcry LCASEs the products name when creating the table, Mac’s NFS filesystem was forgiving but on Linux the problem reared it’s head. Had to rename the table manually and it all worked fine again. Perhaps this is just a bug in the beta that will be fixed come the release date.

I wrote this based entirely off my memory do hope I haven’t left anything out!!!