This will be my first time as a speaker at at (any) conference. My session, entitled 'Future proofing your application development' is aimed at people that are struggling with CF OO syle development that is now prolific in many of the big and popular frameworks. It will take a pragmatic look at how you develop now, with steps you can take to easy yourself into this world, if indeed you decide that it is for you.

I will also be arriving in Melbourne a day early to attend the Inaugural FarCry DevCamp at Melbourne Law School and will be show casing the new Paterson's Extranet bult on Farcry 5.2

Posted by AJ Mercer at 11:50 am - Categories: ColdFusion

Jul 30 2009

A CFML framework for the rest of us

I have been looking at a number of frameworks for awhile but have found them to be either:

too complex / hard to get my head around
seem like overkill for the applications I build
have too much plumbing for my liking

and on some occasions all of the above.

Sean Corfield (Mr Frameworks) is currently working on something that I think is going to suit me nicely - FW/1. Introducing Framework One will tell you all about it.

It is a conventions based framework, like cfWheels, that does not need a lot of configuration to get started. Something that I really like is you can start your site off with just views (and layouts), and then add controllers and services in later. This means you can have a site up and running very quickly; no messing around with plumbing / listeners / general OO headaches.

Conventions and auto-wiring feels a little like black magic at first, but once you understand the rules (FW/1 documentation is really good and there are plenty of example apps), it is a joy to work with.

And for a single file framework (one CFC of about 400 lines), it is no light-weight in terms of functionality; full MVC and hooks to popular bean factories like ColdSpring. It currently runs on ColdFusion, Railo and soon Open BlueDragon.

Posted by AJ Mercer at 5:16 pm - Categories: CFML | ColdFusion | Railo

May 27 2009

Railo Express with Virtual Hosts

I wanted to play around with Railo's Extentions without too much messing around. So I thought I would use Railo Express, but I wanted a web site per application, so they could run from the web root. After a bit of Googling (with google cache to the rescure for www.railo-technologies.com/en/index.cfm?treeID=211) I found out how to get this working. This blog is mostly for my personal records, but if it helps others that is great too.

In /contexts directory you will see railo.xml. Make a copy of this file, eg railo-mangoblog.xml, and then edit it.
Find the following
    <Set name="resourceBase">
        <SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/webroot/
    </Set>
and change webroot to a new name, eg webroot-mangoblog

In the same file, uncomment the virtual hosts section and add you domain. eg
<Set name="virtualHosts">
    <Array type="String">
      <Item>mangoblog.railo.org</Item>
    </Array>
</Set>

Save this file.

Next create the directory you just defined in the same directory as webroot.

(Re)Start Railo using the BAT file(s). You should see a WEB-INF directory being created for you. You can now administor you site for that domain, eg http://mangoblog.railo.org/railo-context/admin/index.cfm

Posted by AJ Mercer at 7:19 pm - Categories: Railo

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