Crazy, crazy world out there. It looks like I may get a green flag to have my company, Geodesic GraFX, on the community page at getrailo.org. I wouldn't be hosting today without a great open source product like Railo, and I'm flattered to be given a chance to have my name out there as a recommended host.
By way of the grapevine, I was hooked up with a client in DC that had upgraded their server from CFMX 7.x to CF 9.x. There were some issues with built-in functions in the older FarCry code, but that was corrected by the team at Myriad. The front end was working fine, but the FarCry admin was giving a blank page.
In the past, I've seen this with older versions of Railo and built-in functions clashing, and that was the assumption I went with. Alas, that turned out to not be it. However, there were clues in the error logs of the CFadmin. Essentially, it was going into an odd loop looking for a file called "apps.cfm". Ahhhh, that file. It's been a while, but that file controls how the admin finds projects against the URL you're coming in from.
Once I put a call to <cfset stApps['site.local'] = 'farcry_site'>, the FarCry admin started working on my local test. Rock on!
It was a fun little adventure for a weekend. I thought, should anyone else run into this, it'd be nice to document it for future reference.
I know this is late, but I've got this plan offering up and in place! In fact, even if you're not a GoDaddy refugee you can get 30 days of free hosting to see if Railo+MySQL+Apache works for you. You can find details here.
Be forewarned, this will not be in any way technical or ColdFusion related at all.
I follow Alton Brown, Scott Mosier, Jason Mewes, and Kevin Smith and Bruce Campbell on social media. That's it, as far as celebrities go. Alton is the only TV personality. Mewes, Smith and Mosier are all kick ass Viewaskew folks. Bruce? C'mon, Xiana, Evil Dead, Brisco County... guy is just witty as hell. Even on twitter.
Alton is going on a book tour to promote his latest book, and he's released a fanifesto on what he expects from his fans. It's mostly common sense, but it brings to mind something I think about on a semi-casual basis.
That thought, as boring as it may be, is this. I'd LOVE to meet some of the celebs that make great art that enriches my life. But to meet them, I mean nothing more than a smile, handshake, and a "Thanks. Thanks for making a difference, even just for 90 minutes, in my life". That's honestly where it would end for me. And maybe that's strange to most folks, but I cannot ever see being able to make small talk with folks outside the technical community. I don't ever want to be "friends" with these folks, as I just don't see there being a common view point for sharing.
I felt a bit like this at NCDevCon as well. It was great just to shake Ray and Ben's hands. I guess the only difference there, is they're far more interactive within the social community. And that again works for me, as that's the best medium for me to communicate.
Color me strange, but just some random thoughts for the end of the day.
I had a great two days at NCDevCon. I had two goals for myself at this conference. One, was "a funny thing happened on the way to looking for jobs, I ran into a conference". And, cram as much knowledge into my head over a weekend as possible.
On the second point, I'd say mission accomplished. Looking up information on mobile dev online is great, but it's beyond compare when someone else does all this hard slogging for you and packages it up in a fifty minute presentation. It appears that I need to give Air/Flex some serious consideration if I want to do cross platform support.
On the first point, well... I showed up. I'm not really able to socialize with my fellow man. At least, not until they get to know me after a few weeks. It's a shortcoming I've had for as long as I can remember, and it's just life being on the spectrum (Autism, that is). That's why I've been so pleased to partner with Metorsite over the years. They guys that run it are the consumate sales guys, leaving me to do what I know best - the Tech Guy (tm).
It was great to meet Ben Nadel and Ray Camden. As mentioned above, I'm just not much of a socializer, so a handshake and a "thanks" is about as far as my conversations usually go.
I'm pretty CFML engine agnostic anymore, and I realize that Adobe is a major sponsor, but I wonder if Railo has any place for next years NCDevCon? I'll forward that thought on to TacFUG, and I guess we'll see.
I think I'm going to stay with the Mobile track today. The exception being a session on Node.js. At least I'll be able to see what that's all about. This is well worth the $60 price tag, for sure.
It's been busy here at the ranch, but I promise to have a tiral hosting plan together for my hosting site (Geodesic GraFX) after NCDevCon is over.
I've not run into this issue in Adobe CF+Apache, but it happens to me with Resin/Railo+Apache.
If you use Apache Aliases, and expect to be able to serve CFML templates through them, and you're using Railo, you're going to need to also make a Railo mapping. So, for an alias like:
Alias /myadmin <projectpath>/<somefolder>
You'll also need to log into your Railo admin for the context, and create a mapping
So let's say you support multiple customers, and a mix of Adobe ColdFusion, Railo, and multitudes of J2EE servers. You want to remain true to the environment you're developing against, so you end up installing all the pieces to make that happen. At one point, I had ACF 6.x - 8.x installed on my laptop, but for now I just need ACF 9.x and Railo+Resin or Tomcat.
I like to pipe everything through Apache. I realize that most modern J2EE engines can handle tons of traffic, most still cannot (easily) match the power of mod_rewrite and Apache.
I won't be detailing how you install ACF, or Apache, etc in this post. I do plan on doing so at some point down the line, but it won't be this post.
Firstly, in your httpd.conf, we set up our Resin/ACF DLLs.
Next, make a directory to hold your Apache virtual hosts configs and add this nifty line to your httpd.conf. Note, this is the windows syntax. You don't need the *.conf in *nix for whatever reason.
Make a site1.conf in the mysites folder, and this is what it would look like for ACF.
For Resin+Railo, it'd look like this for site2.conf
For our last example, site3.conf, we'll use Tomcat+Railo
I'm going to my first CF conference! To be honest, it's because for the first time in 10 years I'm a) close enough to get there by car in under an hour, b) since I've never had a company want to foot the bill, also able to afford this one.
Now I guess I'm going to have to figure out what sessions I can make... and how the heck I can bribe a babysitter to stay long enough so that I can make the Saturday networking event. Ah, the joys of parenthood.
