For the last 6 years I have been working for Loud-n-clear Ltd, with whom I merged CFMX Hosting back in 2003. After 6 years of feeling like I was banging my head against a brick wall  I decided it was time split the companies up again so that I could actually work on growing and expanding CFMX Hosting, and get out of the rut I had found myself in. So In January I left Loud-n-clear, separating CFMX Hosting and taking it with me and launched a new company called "BlueThunder Internet". This will be the new name of CFMX Hosting, which I am re-branding to be more generic and less CF-centric which I feel will be a positive move in the in this current recession where I don't think one can afford to restrict oneself to such a small niche especially in such a competive market place as hosting. Plus there is the fact that there is no such thing as "CFMX" any longer since Adobe changed the name back to plain "ColdFusion", so I have been thinking of changing the name for a while.

While I am still a huge ColdFusion fan it is no longer the only cfkid on the block, so my new company will be specialising in "CFML" and supporting the likes of Railo and BlueDragon as well as ColdFusion and all the other usual technologies. I have become a big fan of Railo of late especially since it is far better suited to the shared hosting environment than ColdFusion with its per site admin interface which means less support tickets and more control for the customer, plus the security side of things is also significantly better.

If you haven't yet heard about railo or you have heard about it but don't know why you would want to use it, I strongly recommend heading over to CFMeetup and watching the recent recording of the Railo 3.1 Open Source Presentation, this should give you some idea of how cool Railo is and some of awesome and unique new features it provides, or perhaps like me it will even get you as excited as you used to be about ColdFusion :-)

With the emergence of open BlueDragon and railo now also being open source as well, I think this is going to give a much needed boost to CFML as a language and the community at large. Finally CFML is now on equal footings with the likes of PHP as it is now also free to download and use, but with the added advantage of being easier to learn and more powerful, oh and it works better on windows too ;-)

For those who may be wondering where the name "BlueThunder" came from, it was many many hours of trying to find a domain name that wasn't already taken and is easy to remember, which is very hard by the way. I had exhausted just about every name using the word "fusion" or "hosting" so I then randomly just decided to start thinking of names of old 8 bit computer games and old TV shows and then I remembered that old show about the helicopter called Blue Thunder, which as well as liking the name I thought was also a bit of a play on words in the same vein as ColdFusion, it has that same feeling of power, so having found a domain name that was free, I snapped it up. You may also notice the new logo might look slightly reminiscent of the original Allaire ColdFusion logo.

I have been coding a new protX interface for a client this week for processing credit card payments. Bizarrely out of the blue today my code stopped working. Even though nothing had changed on my end, any attempt to send a transaction through to the protX server resulted in a response of "connection failure". I switched my code to post to the live server instead of the the test server, and suddenly I got a response back, so it definitely wasn't a connection problem my end and my code was still working. So I gave protX support a call (actually I opened a ticket first, but they never replied, and still haven't 12 hours later), and their support guy assured me that nothing had changed on their end and that nothing was broken, so it must be a problem with my code. Which is actually quite ironic as it is usually me saying this to customers who are saying "My code is fine it must be your server". So as this conversation was clearly going no further it was time to put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and start investigating.

One thing the support guy had pointed out is that my transactions were coming through, so I logged into my VSPadmin and there indeed were my transactions, so why was I getting a "connection failure" in my CF page?

So next I tried a plain old HTML form, which posted directly to the protX gateway, and this worked and I got back the expected response, so it seemed the problem was only affecting ColdFusion pages and my CFHTTP call, now that is weird I thought.

Next I checked the HTTP response headers from the live and test servers, being as I had already discovered that posts against the live server were still working, there had to some difference between the two.

Live showed

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:40:33 GMT Content-Language: en-GB Content-Length: 312 Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

Test showed

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Vary: Accept-Encoding Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:41:49 GMT Content-Language: en-GB Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

The main difference here being the "vary: Accept-Encoding" part. A bit of googling on this header told me it is to do with http compression. So it seemed that protX had turned on http compression on their test server without telling anyone. So I added the following to my CFHTTP call.

<cfhttpparam type="Header" name="Accept-Encoding" value="deflate;q=0"> 

And lo and behold, things started working again. So my previous assumption was correct and while browsers may know how to decompress gzipped or deflate encoded content by default , ColdFusion does not it seems.

If you send the Accept-Encoding HTTP header, then httpZip (or any other compression solution) should be responding with the first compression scheme specified by that header's value.  So, in other words, if the cfhttp call is sending:

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

Then the server running httpZip should be responding with gzip-encoded data (which would be accompanied by the HTTP header "Content-Encoding: gzip").  If, on the other hand, the cfhttp call is sending:

Accept-Encoding: deflate

Or

Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip

Then the response from the httpZip-enabled server should be deflate-encoded data (which would be signaled by the HTTP header "Content-Encoding: deflate").

Now i say should be, but in this case it is not, as I still get the same response back from the protX server regardless, even though it is taking notice of the new header in my request.

I certainly hope protX are not planning to enable http compression on their live server without warning, otherwise they may have a lot of very pissed off customers with broken shopping carts.

So you may want to set the above header in your CFHTTP calls by default just in case, it wont have any affect if there no active http compression, but may save your ass if it gets enabled in the future.

This isn;t exactly new news, but was new to me, so I thought it worth blogging as it may have slipped by others too. According to the CF 8 EULA change the ColdFusion license changed in v8.01 and it now allows you to have a copy of CF installed for backup and recovery purposes.

Key paragraph From the ColdFusion 8 EULA (PDF):

 2.3 Backup and Disaster Recovery. Licensee may make and install a reasonable number of copies of the Software (ColdFusion) for backup and archival purposes and use such copies solely in the event that the primary copy has failed or is destroyed, but in no event may Licensee use such copies concurrently with Production Software or Development Software. Licensee may also install copies of the Software in a Disaster Recovery Environment for use solely in disaster recovery and not for production, development, evaluation or testing purposes other than to ensure that the Software is capable of replacing the primary usage of the Software is case of disaster.

This is great news for companies that want to have a hot backup server that they can easily switch live if their production server bombs out.

If you have received this error from a Datasource of type "OTHER"  using the JDBC connector/j driver then this may be your solution. It may apply to other DSN type issues as well.

When you create the Datasource initially everything seems to work just fine, but after a while it will mysteriously stop working with the error

Error Executing Database Query.

Can't find configuration template named 'coldfusion'

This is most likley to occur if you are in a sandboxed environment, the reason being that when a DSN is created it uses a pooled connection, and as the CFADMIN has access to everything it works fine. But when the connection has timed out, ColdFusion is no longer able to re-establish the connection due to security restrictions of the site now trying to establish the connection. 

The template named ColdFusion the error refers to would seem to be the  file /com/mysql/jdbc/configs/coldFusion.properties from inside the connector/j jar, which the MySQL connector tries to use to do some autoconfiguration for coldfusion to optimise it.

If you add the following to your JDBC URL, then this should resolve the problem by stopping the ColdFusion optimisation and thus removing the need for the conenctor to access that file.

autoConfigureForColdFusion=false

E.G

JDBC:mysql://myserver:3306/myDatabase?autoConfigureForColdFusion=false&allowMultiQueries=true&useDynamicCharsetInfo=false 

Adobe has announced that ColdFusion is now free for educators and students.  The licensing is such that it isn't free for production use, but rather for learning. I am not sure how this differs from the free developer edition that already existed, perhaps it doesn't have any IP restrictions.

Hopefully this will lead to many students getting their hands dirty and educators empowered to teach CF even more, especially now that there 3 CFML engines to choose from, Open BlueDragon, Railo and of course ColdFusion.

"Adobe ColdFusion 8 for Education is available for free to educational customers to use for learning purposes only and not for production purposes. This includes all qualified students, faculty and staff of eligible education institutions"