JohnBs personal blog

off on vacation to Cancun, Mexico first thing tomorrow morning for two weeks. I’ll make sure I get on with the LearnFB series when i come back - there’s a few more things i can show you….

I’ve just been playing with webservices for the first time and come across a few ‘gotchas’ which i’m a little curious about. Firstly, if i place a CFC in my webroot locally I can view the XML descriptor by accessing it as http://localhost/mycfc.cfc?wsdl but if i put the same CFC up to my hosted account i get an Axis error returned (if the CFC is in the site root). I did some digging and found someone who’d had a similar problem and the problem went away if you move the CFC to a sub directory beneath the site root. Sure enough, if i move mycfc.cfc to a folder ‘cfcs’ off my site root and amend the url I can view the descriptor and call methods on it remotely.

Now this could be a ‘common’ occurance but i couldn’t find any technotes on the subject and the documentation doesn’t indicate this. Any thoughts?

The conference had ended so a bunch of us including Steve Nelson, Ray Muradez, Perry Woodin headed out to allegedly ‘the best Chinese restaurant’ one of the other guys had ever eaten at. We met Michael Smith in the lobby but despite living in Rockville had never heard of Joe’s Noodle House. It was just a short walk away and soon we were sitting round a table. The menu had only 1 item on it that i recognized from Chinese restaurants in the UK, Crispy Shredded Beef. Ray Muradez took a fancy to the ‘Duck Feet’ in the appetizer section thinking that they couldn’t possibly be real Duck Feet, boy he was wrong! This plate turned up with about 20 yellow cold Duck Feet in a sauce - his comment was “cold, sauce is good, a little chewey and all i can taste is cartelidge!”, only 3 were actually eaten, two by Mike Ricthie. NICE!!! Least he didn’t order the ‘Duck Tongue’ too!

After dining we headed over the road to a well established US chain where waitresses walk round in little shorts and tight tops only to find that unless you carry a USA driving license or a foreign passport they wouldn’t serve you drinks…who visits a foreign country and carries their only ID to get home with them??? In the end the manager came out with a ‘driving licence book’ which had a picture of the UK drivers license and the British Columbia license in so the ale began flowing.

Now for some time now, Steve Nelson and Erik Voldengen have for some strange reason thought that I resemble Harry Potter - Steve persueded our waitress (who also hadn’t heard of the Noodle bar directly opposite!!!) and another to cover my eyes and draw a lightening bolt with a magic marker on my forehead….thanks Steve! I sure got an odd look from the cop in the washroom when i was washing it off! Sorry, no picture evidence sadly the picture didn’t come out!

Time to wrap my reports up from the Fusebox conference with a report from the Sunday.

Despite the  8:30am start Sean Corfield got an excellent turn out at his ‘Blackstone and what is means for Fusebox’ session. It’s really great to see people like Sean coming round to the idea of Fusebox, I remember reading some of his quite critical posts back in 3.0 days but now with 4.0 and 4.1 he’s very enthusiastic about it. As expected Sean did a fine job in a relatively short period of time demonstrating some cool features in Blackstone, the event gateways using a cell phone to update a blog, cfdocument producing PDF/Flashpaper versions of a website and other Blackstone stuff.

Matt Liotta then chaired a Mach-II birds of a feather with Ben Edwards, Hal and Sean. I was a little disappointed as I was expecting it to be a Mach-II primer as it’s not something l’ve had time to look into yet so didn’t pick up much from this session…except that people were talking about listeners and annoucing events, blah blah blah….

The session before lunch, John Paul Ashenfelter gave an inspiring session on ‘Leveraging Java Tools for FB4‘ which has given me plenty of food for thought. He spoke about ANT and how he’s using it for deploying FB4 apps using tasks which (for instance) change the application mode from development to production (he did mention other uses but i’ve forgotten them now ). He went on to speak about logging and leveraging the Jakarta Commons-Logging (JCL) log4j which is already used by MM in CFMX in the CFTRACE tag. John showed a Fusebox4 plugin which he’s written to use log4j for his application logging.

After lunch Matt Liotta chaired a session on Fusebox Tools where Steve Nelson demoed Fusebox Explorer, Wells Burke demoed Adalon 3.0, Mike Ritchie demoed Fusebuilder and Matt demoed He3’s MachII support. The session after, Steve Nelson spoke about ‘Fusedocs in the Real world’ using the clockmakers Tempus and Hora as analogies of how to write code and also a number of examples of how not to document code. Matt then chaired a final session ‘Selling FB’ before Michael Smith wrapped the 2004 conference up and dished out a heap of raffle prizes to those who had filled in the conference surveys and handed their raffle tickets in.

Following Sean’s post (here) I figured I’d take a look at the browser share hitting my site too. I’ve only be able to do it since early September as I had my host move my reporting to a different server and i didn’t have historical logs imported. I’ve also had to drop about 3000 visitors as they didn’t leave behind any OS/Browser tracking info.

Whereas Sean had 76% of visitors using Windows I’ve got a whopping 95% using various Microsoft OSs from XP down to 98. Sean reports 46% of his visitors are using IE, my count IE visitor count is 56%, followed by 24% Netscape and 11% Firefox

As with previous years the team from Synthis were there with their Adalon product, an *ALL* new 3.0 version. I grabbed a demo disk in between a couple of sessions and i must say i’m very very impressed. It’s fast, easier to use, now supports Fusebox 4.0 (MVC or not). In fact, I built my entire website in it (just for fun) in under an hour (about 4 circuits and 100 fuses) and the code it produced was pretty spot on. You can control application properties from within Adalon, stuff like fuseactionvariables, defaultfuseaction etc (the parameters section of fusebox.xml.cfm). Remember, it is a BETA release, there a number of things missing - eg no plugin control, default fuseaction list returns only fuseaction names (although stores using circuit.fuseaction syntax), I suggested to Wells that it only returns ‘public’ circuits/fuseactions. The forms for data collection are now all defined in simple XML so it’s super fast to customize a form, eg adding contentvariable support to the include verb in 4.1.

If you’ve used a previous version of Adalon then you’re going to be amazed at how much better is 3.0 is - i’d encourage you to check it out on the new Adalon website, www.adalon.net (download still to be released).

Michael Smith got things started bright and early on Saturday morning welcoming everyone and introducing the speakers, followed by a keynote by Hal. In his keynote Hal spoke about how he is now re-enthused by ColdFusion (which is great to hear, I remember a few years back it was a much more doom and gloom approach and that we as CF developers must now look to new languages, Java, .NET etc) and how he believes Macromedia has conceeded to the Java and .NET platforms in the top spots but that with the release of Blackstone MM will have a product unlike any other app server, Flash forms etc. MM are strongly pushing the UI functionality along with ‘user experience’ in Blackstone, Flash Forms, Xforms, CFDOCUMENT etc where had it been a more developer focused release they might have concentrated on significant OO enhancements - constructors, interfaces etc. JohnQ finished off the keynote with a brief overview of the Fusebox4.1 updates, before the general sessions got underway.

Just before lunch I attended Barney Boisverts presentation on ‘Using CFCs with Fusebox’ - a sort of misnamed presentation but nevertheless a great presentation. Barney spoke about problems with FB (no? Really? It’s perfect ) mainly related to issues in 4.0 but which have been addressed in 4.1 (and future releases) and how CFCs address the key concepts of Encapsulation and Abstraction. Taking an MVC application, be it HTML, Flash, Webservices CFCs are able to provide the Model layer in all applications so increasing code reuse. So why use Fusebox? Because CFCs are excellent in the model layer, ie handling business logic but Fusebox is awesome when it comes to managing layouts etc and is a proven framework to plug it all together with.

I lunched with Sean, BrianK and Mike Ritchie at a pizza place over the road, after lunch attending Jeffs ‘XML and FB configuration files’ presentation then Sandys ‘Layouts in FB4 presentation’. Sandy’s presentation was a rerun of her Vegas presentation (last years conference?) but i’d never seen it before so it was a good reminder just how flexible FB4 is when it comes to layouts. A ‘Fuse Panel’ chaired by Jeff Peters closed the day off before everyone retired to ‘Polly Esthers’ for the Fuseball tournament and beer!

I’ve just made a change to my codebase so that entries read via RSS are time stamped correctly - something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Posts displayed in the HTML version had the correct time but posts read on RSS where -5 hrs (down to the fact i live in the UK but host in the USA) and when i was aggregated by the UK Blog Aggregator or Fullasagoog it looked like i work all night!

Well behaved news readers shouldn’t experience any problems, like duplicated entries etc - apologies if you do though

With the 4.1 ’alpha’ custom lexicon has been introduced to enable us to write our own verbs and it really is quite cool!

At the moment you can’t create verbs than have child elements or closing tags without having to cheat a little bit. When we were first discussing the custom lexicon implementation Steve Nelson asked if it was possible to wrap <include>’s inside a <cftransaction> block, i wrote a ‘transaction’ verb which lets me do it - with a little bit of cheating.

You can download the verb, here. REMEMBER though custom lexicon is in 4.1 beta release strictly as a proof of concept, it might not be present in later versions! Youll need to register a lexicon custom name space and path in fusebox.xml.cfm to use the verb.

I landed in DC around 5pm and got the Metro ($3.90) to Twinbrook - man it’s easy! The DoubleTree is directly behind Twinbrook metro station so if you fly into Reagan it’s a breeze to get to. I’d checked in and phone round to see if anyone else had checked in only to find two guys I know from the UK checking in too - they had insider information about where the speakers/sponsors dinner was being held so we headed out to gate crash.

After hooking up with the guys one group left to drink beer in Steve/Perry and Ray’s rooms whilst the remainder went off to play Snap (or another card game that Hal likes!). Now, I’ve been running the FB4.1 cores in various states on this site now for about two weeks but we’d had huge problems getting it to run on BlueDragon, in fact if you had all the BlueDragon error reporting options switched on when you ran the demo app all you got was a white screen! It was only when you turned some of the options off did things start appearing. For the remainder of Friday night myself, David Epler, BarneyB, SteveN took the hotseat in front of the laptop to try and get 4.1 to work on BD and in the end after much raping of the core files SteveN (aka Wolverine) isolated the problem. Line 115 of the fusebox4.1.0.runtime.cfmx.cfm file is as follows:

For some reason this line was the root cause of the problem - possibly an infinite loop resulting in a stackoverflow???? Removing it and replacing about 4 references to the fb_. variable fixed the problem. Wooohoo, the demo app ran but then none of the fuseactions that invoked CFCs worked, that was later narrowed down by David Epler to the <invoke> verb using return=, this will be changed in a later beta release to returnvariable=. With 4.1 now working (we think) on BD it was time to get some sleep.