newschuyl

ColdFire 1.9 Released

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:54:00-0400

Over the weekend I released ColdFire 1.9.207.249. This version works with Firefox 9 and Firebug 1.9. You can download the latest from the new GitHub project site. If you have the current 1.7.207.246 version installed, there is no need to update your server side debugging code as that has not changed with this release.

Changes in the ColdFire Project

There have been some changes to the project with this release, the biggest is the move to GitHub. Moving forward the code will be hosted on GitHub and I will use the GitHub issue tracker to track bugs. The packaged releases can also be downloaded from the GitHub downloads page and I'm hoping to put some documentation up on in a wiki or project page soon. I'll continue to maintain the RIAForge site, but I've disable the blog, forums, issue tracker. I'm hoping this move to GitHub will encourage people to contribute to ColdFire.

Why did this release take so long

I know a lot of people have been asking for an updated ColdFire for some time. Some people have even thought the project was dead. Well about that... As any user of Firefox knows, in the Spring of 2011 Firefox moved to a new rapid release cycle. In order to better keep pace with the Firefox, the Firebug team set about improving the internal architecture of Firebug. Unfortunately this meant that the changes introduced in Firebug 1.8 broke ColdFire. In another interesting Firebug development, right around the same time as the Firebug 1.8 release John J Barton, the lead developer of Firebug for the past several years, left the Firebug Working Group. All of this meant that Firebug 1.8 was a bit of a transitional release. I made a few attempts to get ColdFire working on Firebug 1.8 but ultimately determined a substantial re-write of ColdFire was in order. Rather than building on the Firebug 1.8 release, I decided to wait for Firebug 1.9, which would be the second release on the new internal architecture. Firebug 1.9 was released earlier this month and since then I've been working on the ColdFire update as I've had time.

What's next?

For a long time I've been against posting ColdFire to the Mozilla Addons site, or AMO, because ColdFire is more than just the Firefox extension; it also requires the ColdFusion debugging templates. However with Firefox's new rapid release cycle I can no longer manually update the extension every time a new Firefox is released so look for the next release of ColdFire to be on AMO. That's all for now. As always, please report any issues with ColdFire to the new GitHub issue tracker.

Introducing A New Validation Framework, OK!

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:24:00-0400

Today I released a new ColdFusion 9 ORM entity validation framework named OK!. This framework grew out of my attempt to use Hyrule in a large FW/1 Mura plugin. I really liked Hyrule, but I ran into a few issues with the framework and OK! is an attempt to address those issues. OK! works very much like Hyrule, except it:

supports nested validation,
supports component level validation,
has better custom rule integration,
and supports all IsValid() validation rules including regular expressions.

Documentation is still a work in progress but there are plenty of examples of how to use the framework in the /tests directory. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

New Version of ColdFusion WebSocket Gateway

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:21:00-0400

Today I finally got around to updating my cf-websocket-gateway project. This version is based on the Webbit WebSocket server, which is itself based on the Netty project. I made this change because the Java-Websocket server I was using was not being updated and Webbit is a very nice WebSocket server that supports the latest versions of the WebSocket specifications and thus works with the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, etc. Of course, shortly after migrating to Webbit, Java-Websocket was updated to support the latest WebSocket specifications so if you would like to continue to use that server as the underlying engine for your gateway check out the java-websocket branch on Github. I should note that the API has changed with this release. If you have existing listener CFCs that use the onClientOpen and onClientClose listener methods those should be renamed to simply onOpen and onClose. Once that change is made your existing listeners should work with version of the gateway. As always, please report any issues on the Github project page.

Secure CFCOOKIE Security Consideration

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:41:00-0400

Last night I gave a presentation to my local Philly CFUG, part of which covered the creation of cookies from ColdFusion. In the course of presenting I "discovered" that it is possible to set secure cookies in response to a non-secure request.

Now, the browser will not send that cookie on subsequent requests if you are not using a secure connection, however, if the cookie was set on a non-secure page the value of that cookie has already been exposed to potential hijacking.

The Lesson Learned

If you are using cfcookie with the secure attribute, make sure you are doing so over a secure connection or you may be leaving yourself vulnerable to cookie hijacking.

Issue with ColdFusion?s Built In Solr on Mac

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:10:00-0400

I recently ran into an issue with ColdFusion's built in Solr search server where, while running Solr on Mac OS 10.6, Solr would unexpectedly crash. I was using a custom schema and attempting to use Solr's data import handler so I thought they may have had something to do with my problem. After some more testing I found that, even while using the stock schema provided by ColdFusion, Solr would crash under relatively light load. More testing and a fair amount of swearing eventually lead me to the -XX:+AggressiveOpts JVM argument. The Solr startup script used by ColdFusion on the Mac, cfsolr, sets this JVM argument. I wasn't familiar with this argument so I had to go look it up. According to Oracle's documentation, you use the -XX:+AggressiveOpts option to "turn on point performance compiler optimizations that are expected to be default in upcoming releases." To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the "point performance compiler optimizations" are, but being wary of anything labeled aggressive I decided to remove this option and see what happened. I ran my tests again and everything seemed to work. Solr was able to handle the load from my tests and the data import handler began working with my custom schema. I was back in business. After making this discovery I'm still a little concerned as I'm not sure why the -XX:+AggressiveOpt was being used in the first place, but since I'm not running OS X in production I'm fine with making this adjustment on laptop for development. I'd definitely be interested to see if others have run into this issue or to find out more about the -XX:+AggressiveOpts JVM argument.

cf-spreadsheet-taglib

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:26:00-0400

Today I threw together a quick custom tag library for ColdFusion 9 which allows you to build Excel spreadsheets using syntax similar to HTML tables. Right now it is very basic but I plan to expand on it as needed. You can check it out on GitHub.

ColdFire Update

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:19:00-0400

ColdFire has been updated to work with Firefox 4/Firebug 1.7. This is an Add-on update only, so no need to update the server bits with this release. As always report any issues on the RIAForge bug tracker.

AMF Explorer 0.7

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:11:00-0400

AMF Explorer has been updated to work with Firefox 4 and Firebug 1.7. In the process I also added a the ability to copy the AMF data to the clipboard in JSON format. The new version is awaiting review on the AMO site, but if you want to get it now you can install it from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/amf-explorer/versions/

On Null

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:56:00-0400

I'm finally doing a lot of work with CF 9's ORM and I'm finding that dealing with null values in CFML can be quite a pain, especially when working with relationships. One thing that comes up quite a bit is iterating over child collections. ColdFusion goes out of it's way to shield developers from null values, yet when an entity has an empty collection ColdFusion returns a null. (Long time user of CFML would likely expect an empty array here, similar to how <cfquery> returns and empty string for null values, but this is not the case.) This means I end up doing something like this quite a bit: [More]

Quick Tip: cffile action=?append? in cfscript

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:06:00-0400

So this is old news - like ColdFuison 8 old news - but I've only started to use cfscript heavily with ColdFusion 9 so I just ran into this today. If you need to append to a file in cfscript you first need to use FileOpen() to open a file object in the append mode.


fileObj = FileOpen("/path/to/myfile.txt","append");

Then you can append to the file using FileWrite():


FileWrite( fileObj, "What ever is here gets appended.");

Note that unlike the default behavior of <cffile action="append"> FileWrite() does not append a newline character to text written to file. Appending to a file isn't documented on the FileWrite() documentation for either ColdFusion 8 or ColdFuison 9, and the documentation does not list FileOpen() in the See Also section, so this took me a lot longer to figure out than it should have. Anyway, I hope this helps others making the transition from tag based to script based CFML.

ColdFire 1.6 Update

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:45:00-0400

Just a quick post to let folks know I've released an update for ColdFire 1.6 that fixes an issue changing ColdFire views when Firebug is detached from the main browser window. I advise all ColdFire users to update, even you are not seeing this issue, as the initial ColdFire 1.6 release was using an obsolete Firebug API and silently throwing errors. This is a Firebug extension update only so there is no need to update any of the ColdFire templates on the server. Thanks to ColdFire user Rob Barthle for reporting this issue and taking the time to put together a screencast so I could easily see the problem.

ColdFire Update

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:02:00-0400

Yesterday the Firebug team released Firebug 1.6. This version has quite a few updates and bugfixes, but there was also some refactoring done to core components that broke ColdFire. Luckily the Firebug team does a good job with branching in their SVN repo so it was easy enough to compare Firebug 1.5 to 1.6 and make the necessary updates to ColdFire. So, if you have updated to Firebug 1.6 and noticed that ColdFire stopped working, go download the new ColdFire 1.6 and you should be good to go. Note that this release only updated the ColdFire Firebug extension so there should be no need to update any of the ColdFire debugging templates on your ColdFusion servers. As always, if you have any issues please report them on the RIAForge project page.

Solr Indexing of ORM Entities: SolrEntity

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00:00-0400

ColdFusion 9 introduced two new features, Hibernate based ORM and Solr full text search indexing, however using the two together never seemed as easy as it could be. In the Java world you have Hibernate Search or the SolrJ client, both of which allow you to easily include an entity in a Lucene/Solr search index via simple annotations. Taking those projects as inspiration I came up with SolrEntity, a base component that implements ColdFusion ORM event handler methods to manage indexing of an entity via simple annotations (custom metadata attributes). [More]

Another cf-websocket-gateway Update

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 21:28:00-0400

I just released version 1.2 of cf-websocket-gateway. This is a bug fix release which addresses I/O issues in the underlying Java-WebSocket server. If you are using cf-websocket-gateway I highly recommend updating to this latest version.

New cf-websocket-gateway Released

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:47:00-0400

I've released a new version of cf-websocket-gateway which allows for targeted messaging. In the first release, messages were sent to all connected WebSocket clients. With this release you can now send messages to a single client or sets of clients. For more information see the github wiki. I've also upload three sample applications that show how to use the WebSocket gateway with Flash fallback for browsers that do not support WebSockets. The examples are available in the v.1.1 download.