At CFUnited yesterday Adobe announced plans to support “Cloud Computing” in their upcoming version of ColdFusion 9, currently in beta.

Not a lot of details were given (including pricing) but the following bullet points are available from Ben Forta’s site:

• The current CPU based ColdFusion licensing, including no restriction on instances or virtual servers, remains as is in ColdFusion 9.
• ColdFusion will introduce new licensing options for cloud environments, where there is no per CPU model. ColdFusion Standard will allow a single cloud instance, and ColdFusion Enterprise will allow up to 10 cloud instances.
• Split licenses won’t be allowed, so no ColdFusion Enterprise running on 1 CPU and 5 cloud instances.
• Plan to support Amazon EC2 by creating ready-to-use Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

I’m not sure how earth-shattering this is given the amount of details but we’ll surely know more soon.

Joe Rinehart is proposing a new development stack for rapid, RIA development that includes some of my favorite and most used technologies:

• Business layer written in Groovy (Java)
• JPA and Hibernate for database persistence
• Spring for the service layer
• Coldspring / Model-Glue / ColdFusion for the presentation layer
• JMS and Swiz for a nice RIA client push

So other ideas floating around include:

• An ANT based installer to get everything configured and setup properly
• Addition of  Tomcat,  JBoss,  Railo and  OpenBD as optional application servers
• An “Enterprise RIA” stack with BlazeDS and Spring’s new BlazeDS integration (my personal favorite)
• An automated Flex project template with the Swiz framework (I’m hoping for Mate as well)
• An automated Eclipse project to hook in an existing application context

I volunteered to be a beta tester so cross your fingers that I get accepted. I’m so excited!!

I finally got around to getting my EC2 instance up and running. I debated upon using an Open BlueDragon, Windows 2003 or Railo AMI. I finally decided upon the Railo image after a collegue (you know who you are) spoke highly about Railo. I found a really good tutorial on setting up EC2 so it only took me an hour or so to get up and running. It was surprisingly easy after getting my AWS keys issues and the command line tools installed.

I don’t have alot of experience with Linux (I’ve played around with Red Hat and Ubuntu) so sometimes the simple tasks are the most painful as I don’t know all of the SSH commands.

My next task is to setup (or start?) an FTP service and then configure a new website. I’m think about moving my jeffdouglas.com domain to this server.

I had a few minutes to spare this morning so I thought I would install Open BlueDragon on one of our dev servers. In case you don’t know, Open BlueDragon is an open source version of BlueDragon, an alternative J2EE CFML engine to Adobe ColdFusion. We have the commercial version of BlueDragon installed on a couple of boxes but this was my first experience with the open source version.

Installation was quite simple and fast and my application was up and running in under 30 minutes. After installing the latest JRE on the server, my biggest decision was which version of Open BlueDragon to install:

1. J2EE WAR – Drop this into your favorite J2EE server (JBoss, Weblogic, Tomcat, etc.) and you are off and running.
2. Jetty/OpenBD – Open BlueDragon preconfigured with the Jetty web server. You can basically drop the folder onto your server, make a few configuration changes and start java.
3. Amazon EC2 – A pre-configured AMI (CentOS, Open BlueDragon, Jetty, and MySQL) to be used with Amazon’s EC2 service.
4. VMware – A pre-configured virtual (CentOS, Open BlueDragon, Jetty, and MySQL) that can be imported into VMware.

I chose the Jetty/OpenBD option and the process was very smooth and somewhat simple. Since there is no Administrator, everything is done through the jetty.xml configuration file. They provide a sample, documented configuration file that provided me with the syntax for adding a new datasource.

I think my next step is to setup an EC2 instance of Open BlueDragon and see if I can run my personal website off of it.

We have a content management system that has been in production for a couple of years on the same server running CFMX7. I don’t believe we’ve done anything to the server recently.

Today the CMS generated a client’s site incorrectly. The Javascript didn’t work right nor did any Flash. I poked around the code and a number of script, object and embed tags had been changed to InvalidTag? I serached around and quickly found this post on Ray Camden’s site explaining the situation.

So I went into the CFMX admin and unchecked Enable Global Script Protection. I recycled CF and generated the site again and still the same problem!

I searched some more and found another post explaining how I could alter the internal setting of CF. I tried this and still nothing! I then reset these settings and search further into my application code.

I finally realized that some of the header and footer templates that were used to generate the HTML had the InvalidTag hardcoded into the template. Once I replaced these tags and rebuilt the site it worked like a champ. The setting in the CFMX admin did the trick.