Brad Melendy

Earlier this month, Google launched App Inventor, a tool that lets non-programmers develop basic Android applications for mobile devices. The obvious implication is that it also opens the door for all the programmers out there without a working knowledge of Java to produce simple Android apps as well.

For a couple years I’ve been thinking it might be neat to try producing an app for an Android phone but didn’t have the time or inclination to tackle learning Java, the language used to develop Android applications. Like lots of programmers out there, I’ve had some exposure in college but that was long forgotten and never used as I worked as a ColdFusion programmer the last eight years. But this opens a door for me. If I get hooked creating simple apps, I’ll likely put out the extra effort to get a working knowledge of Java and take it to the next level.

I think this is exactly the sort of thing that could potentially bring lots of new developers into the Android market place. Give them a taste of what they can do with a tool like App Inventor and some will surely take the next step to produce more complex apps. Besides, you never know what a creative person might come up with. Some of the biggest success stories to come out of the mobile app market have been extremely simple tools that were more about a creative idea than complex application development.

I’ve been trying about once a year for the last 4 years to switch away from Dreamweaver to Eclipse with the CFEclipse plugin. Each time, I always ended up going back to Dreamweaver because the Eclipse/CFEclipse combination just wasn’t able to replace DW for me. Finally though, I am happy to say that I have found the right free alternative to Dreamweaver in Aptana and CFClipse.

There were really only two things I needed to replace Dreamweaver, a CFML tag editor and the concept of a remote site like Dreamweaver has. Eclipse always had spotty FTP support that I could never get working. Not until Aptana 2.x did I find a version of Eclipse that had solid FTP support and the concept of a remote site that supported “upload on save”.

I’ve been using the combination of Aptana Studio and CFEclipse for about three months now and I really don’t miss Dreamweaver at all. Occasionally I wish I had a GUI display for editing like DW has, but that is very rare. In the end I’m very happy with my switch after having used Dreamweaver in various forms from UltraDev to CS4 over the last 8 years. If you are looking for a free option, Aptana and CFEclipse might be for you.

Ran into this today, strange setup but I’m running Coldfusion 9 with Apache (WAMP Server) 2.2.11. The short story is that I installed and configured CF just fine, but when it came time to execute CFML pages, nothing would happen unless I put the name of the file at the end of the URL? So in the case of index.cfm, I had to actually type that on the end of the URL?

Initially I figured I forgot to add index.cfm to the DirectoryIndex in httpd.conf. I did that and restarted apache and still no execution of index.cfm?? After googling a bit and finding nothing, I examined the only other portion of apache I thought could be responsible. The spot where JRun gets loaded as an Apache module. Sure enough, the following line was at the bottom:

AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws

It was obvious I needed to add .cfm to that list in order to have Apache pass any CFML page along to the module for execution by Coldfusion. So I made the following change:

AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm

After that, Apache happily referred index.cfm to JRun for processing. Why the installer didn’t get that setup correctly in the first place I don’t know. The Web Server Configuration Tool said everything was great when I set the server up. Something to watch for and hopefully not waste too much time with next time.

I’ve had this happen on multiple occasions and it isn’t after 30 days either. Most recently, (about 30 minutes ago I might add) a production enterprise server that has been running as with an Enterprise License for two years, crashed and when it restarted, it was a developer edition.

Ok, so now my public facing server has a limit of three concurrent IP addresses, not good. I quickly grab my list of Enterprise serial numbers but uh oh, I can’t log in to the administrator because the rest of the world is trying to hit the server! So I must restart CF and refresh my browser over and over until I beat the rest of the planet to acquire one of my three precious IP slots. Lucky for me I get in, re-apply my serial numbers and I’m back in business.

As to why this happens, I have no idea. I googled and didn’t come up with much (or every time I used the phrase “reverts to developer edition” I got entries talking about what happens after a 30 day trial. At any rate, it seems to happen to me about once every 1-2 years. It always annoys but not enough to make me say things like, “I’m switching to .NET or J2EE”. I suppose those servers have their own issues just as CF has, but the spontaneous reversion to developer edition is indeed a bad one because it renders your server useless.

We are finally upgrading to version 9 of Adobe Coldfusion and I was pleasantly pleased to find out thaasdft we no longer need to purchase additional enterprise licenses for our development and test servers. According to the new license agreement distributed with Coldfusion 9, if you buy a license you can apply the license for an internal development, test or staging instance server:

3.1.3 If Licensee purchases one or more Production Software licenses, then Adobe also grants Licensee the right to install and use the Software as Development Software for internal development, testing and staging.

This is great because in the past, we had practiced buying a full license for our development environment even though we only ever hit the server with a dozen or so developers. Occasionally we would perform some load testing and fake lots of users with software, but still it was always on an enterprise server that resided behind the firewall (not accessible by the outside world).

Adobe will surely lose a little money here, but hopefully it attracts more customers with this improved pricing which will make up the difference and then some, not to mention the added benefit of expanding the user base of ColdFusion.

Well, I switched hosts a while back and sorta stopped posting anything on my blog. I don’t have everything back running yet, but am going to get things fixed completely this week.