JohnBs personal blog

So it seems in their wisdom ICANN has voted to relax the strict rules on the top level domains, ie .com, .uk etc meaning now that anything could become a tld, so I could register a domain ‘bah’ – so my web address could be http://foo.bah (as long as I can show a business plan and technical capacity???? That’s some requirement!!!)

Great idea – but what about email addresses? – Of course I’ll want to use my shiney new domain to host my email and I’ll want it to be foo@bah – I bet there’s not a single site out there that would let me register with that as my email address – let alone mail server/application that let’s me set that as my email alias!

Better get on with fixing it guys, it’s going to be here next year!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7475986.stm

Just to add my vote for the requirement of a ColdFusion staging license. Yes we have the developer license for local development but for a none forward facing staging server it’s often not practical to use the development edition due to the IP restrictions.

Whilst we have full licenses for our staging server currently, they’re mostly wasted because we don’t have sites in ‘staging status’ all the time but when we do we may have more than one so can’t get away with using the developers version.

Plus, when it comes to upgrading our production CF licenses we end up having to purchase two licenses (ok, Adobe may like this) one for our live environment and one to keep staging at the same level as production.

Maybe throw a popup after a certain number of page requests, insert text into the html stream, limit the number of page requests then require a CF restart, watermarking seems an obvious choice but that sometimes messes with xml/json packets etc being generated. Or how about, if we could purchase additional IP blocks for a nominal amount? That way we could buy an additional 5 IP block and add that to the development version giving us 7 IPs.

But please Adobe, here the pleas for some kind of staging server license!

Top Gear returned to our screens on Sunday night with many stories about the current fuel prices. In one of the stories the fuel economy of a 4 lt BMW M3 was pitched again a 1.5lt Toyota Prius. Each car had to do 10 laps of the track, the Prius was at full bore whilst the BMW had to remain behind the Prius – it turns out that the BMW is more fuel economical than the Prius! Not to mention the enormous distances the materials that go into the Prius travel.

“Weave is a early prototype framework for Web services integration with the browser”

Certainly that doesn’t give much away about what Mozilla Weave is but it is definitely worth looking at. At it’s roots, Mozilla Weave pretty much does (on the surface) what Google Browser Sync did it terms of allowing you to synchronise/backup multiple Firefox installations, this includes bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords and form data.

Just like Google Browser sync it’s implemented as Firefox addin. On your first sync it’s immediately obvious that it’s different to GBS as the data you store is encrypted with your chosen passphrase, so no-one has access to the data server side. In fact, the server that the data is stored on is just a WebDav server (if you go to https://services.mozilla.com after you’ve signed up you can browse your directory to see what’s in there) so you can run your own server to store the data. What’s cool about the Mozilla Weave implementation is that you can share your data, i.e. bookmarks with friends/other parties, despite the data being encrypted! There’s not much more detail on this yet, nor looking around in this early version are there any signs of it having being taken advantage of it but it’s going to be in there at some point.

Mozilla Weave is still an early prototype so not all the features are working, I’m going to have it installed in parallel with Foxmarks but I think it’s going to a pretty cool feature of Firefox. I wonder…if the other browsers are extensible could plugins be written to sync the likes of IE/Safari to the same set of data?

What I (and many others I imagine) found to probably be the most useful Firefox tool, Google Browser Sync will not be developed any further - so no Firefox 3 support.

I had hoped that the Browser Sync team were just being slow off the mark to get a Firefox 3 compatible version out the door but this now confirms that it’s a dead project.

There are few alternatives of course, at the minute I’ve changed over to using Foxmarks which seems to do a pretty good job. Whilst coming down the pipeline Mozilla Weave (and here) looks like a pretty sweet almost direct replacement for Browser Sync.

Read more here.

The guys just announced that Scotch on the Rocks will return in 2009! After putting a fake SOTR RIP slide up!!

See you in 2009!!!

So just caught up with Gert again, here’s what’s happening.

Railo 3.0 Professional will be released FREE.

Railo 3.0 Enterprise will still cost.

Once Railo/JBoss have worked out license implications of their third party party then Railo 3.1 will be fully open sourced (probably by early 2009) therefore FREE. This includes the enterprise version.

Railo/JBoss will offer support programs for the products

Railo & Redhat? giving keynote.

Railo joins JBoss.org and goes entirely Open Source - that’s the announcement.

Railo 3.1 Enterprise not open sourcing due to bundled apps - cfdocument, server administrator, Fusion Reactor, Fusion Debug. FusionDebug to be rewritten to support Railo.

Rail 3.1 - Pro and Community merged. No restrictions in use. Unlimited web contexts, admin console (oops, OpenBD!). FREE! Distributed under LGPL2. Redistribution allowed. Support from Railo community.

JBoss downloads, AS - 7,909,747. Hibernate 3,0392,504.

Railo on steroids..integration of Railo with hibernate, JBoss Cache and JBoss Clustering!

<CFDATA /> (only an idea of a tag name!!!) transparent persistence, pk gen, oo query language, j2ee integration, performance, dual layer cache.

JBoss Cache sounds really cool - cachedwithin used in cluster, action would be performed once per cluster….not per server.

JBoss clustering provides, fail-over, replication and load balancing out of the box! Automatic ‘dancing’ of servers together, they just find each other - zero config!

What else, ESB (SOA Platform) JBPM (Workflow engine) Messaging (JMS broker) maybe….

This is all great news for CFML! Adobe, your turn next

Just announced, Railo is going open source and joins JBoss! More to follow from keynote…

Some neat stuff coming in Rail 3.0 beta which should drop tomorrow. It’s main goal was CF8 compatibility.

Amazon S3 is available as a resource, so create a mapping and then treat S3 as file system. Cluster scope introduced (over http) which is a shared scope across servers - also allows synchronized servers, eg adding datasource on one adds it to all the servers in the cluster - that is way cool!

Railo Task manager - used for stuff like cfmail, managing cluster scope, remote synchronization (eg, server in cluster is down, Task manager stores the task until server is available to update scope). Task manager also manages CFTHREAD,  restarting threads, retry’s etc even across server restarts. Demo between a local instance and jetty instance, updating scope - stopping a server in cluster, updating again and then restarting jetty instance and it receiving the new value. NEAT!

CFVIDEO/CFVIDEOPLAYER/CFVIDEOPLAYERPARAM - used for format conversion (flv, mov, avi,mpeg,mp-4,animated gif), taking a screen shot from point in video, video information - codecs, size etc. Predefined profiles for conversion, YouTube, iPhone, divx,xvid etc. Need to install ffmpeg separately as can’t be distributed with Railo…Woohoo, just won a 1gb memory stick…for  answering true to ‘Does FusionReactor support Railo?’ CFVIDEOPLAYER supports multiple files, full screen, playlists (with preview image). CFFILE destinations can been s3 over http.