JohnBs personal blog

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!

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.

Tomorrow night we’re off to Scotch up in Edinburgh - Neil will be live blogging from the event so make sure you check out his site here.

Unless something major is announced I’ll be leaving him to worry about all the live stuff, I may occasionally Twitter stuff I hear, so if you’re a twitter user you’ll find me at http://twitter.com/johnbeynon. That is of course, if Twitter is working

You know those times when a client phones to say "i think my website is down, can you check for me?" and it turns out not to be a problem with their web  site, more a problem with their internet connection. Sound familiar?

ismywebsiteok.com is something i knocked up in 10 minutes to help in just these circumstances. It performs a cfhttp to the specified URL and checks it get’s a 200 response back - nothing flash, nothing clever - just a simple test from a remote server.

I’ve found myself in a position before when I’ve assured the client that their web site is fine only to find that there is a connectivity problem from the public Internet to the server but I was accessing it via a private network which was just fine…

‘Cos you should be! I am!

I’ve just updated the CF License Calculator to include the various flavours of BlueDragon as well as moving it to it’s new permanent home here rather than a single blog entry.