devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

(Note: I’m cleaning up some old drafts which have been sitting around for awhile.)

A couple of years ago while setting-up a new J2EE server cluster using the Implementing Multitier Hardware Load Balancing with ColdFusion MX for J2EE or JRun article, I needed to setup a proxy filter for ColdFusion requests. Given that the application I was setting up used a context root of /, the proxy rule listed in that article would not work. Instead, thanks to my former co-worker Rod, I now have a regular expression which will redirect all basic requests for ColdFusion:

[code]
^((?:\S*.cfml?\S*)|\S*/(?:\?\S+)?)$
[/code]

This regexp works for the following combinations:

[code]
hello.cfm?hello=2
hello/
sadfa/
dasd/?hello=231
xo.cfm/hello
hello/dookie.cfm
dookie/hello.cfm?thisvar=dookie
/
[/code]

And the following requests are not proxied:

[code]
/hello.html
hello.html
hello/hello.html
[/code]

Obviously these are just basic test cases, but it should leave all CSS, image, JavaScript, etc. type requests to the webserver, and pass on everything else to the app servers. You would also need to change it to include direct requests for .cfc files if you’re doing anything like Flash Remoting, Web Services, etc directly to CFC’s.

As both a fan and user of the great technologies Python, and the Sun JVM (primarily via Java), I was very happy to come across this eWeek article which says that Sun announced the hiring of two key Python engineers. You can read more about the hiring of Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki at their respective blogs.

I had pretty much written off Jython as being dead quite some time ago, but luckily it has had a lot of recent activity and is starting to catch back up with C-Python. By both hiring key JRuby and Jython developers, it looks like Sun is making sure the JVM stays relevant beyond Java and continues to evolve as what in my opinion is the best option for cross-platform applications.

Having a long background in ColdFusion (an Adobe language which compiles down to Java bytecode and runs on the JVM), I’ve seen first hand the benefits of moving a language to the JVM, and I look forward to seeing more progress on both JRuby and Jython on the JVM.

Although this is a topic which has gotten much coverage, to the point of beating a dead horse, I felt obligated to comment on it as someone who served on the Editorial Board of the ColdFusion Developer’s Journal until is was recently shuttered.

When I was originally asked to join the board, I had some strong reservations about it for many reasons, but decided to give it a try for the purpose of helping out the community in a constructive way. For instance, I’d heard about a previous editorial board for LinuxWorld who all resigned at the same time, I think not compensating people who contribute to the magazine is completely unethical, and their website reminds me of a “warez” site where popups, videos, and all kinds of other annoying crap invade your computer. Despite all of that, I assumed that being part of an editorial board would help voice developers concerns like “Your site makes the baby Jesus cry, make it stop!”, “What kind of monkeys are editing the articles?”, and “Why do you keep stealing people’s content and publishing it as your own?”.

I thought perhaps as a board member, I’d have a chance to read articles which were still in draft and help with the code and articles, offer suggestions, and maybe even catch some of those typos which seem to plague the CFDJ. Having worked in ColdFusion for (at the time) 8 years, writing somewhat useful blog entries for quite some time, as well as doing tech editing for a ColdFusion book, and having a Computer Science background (kind of a rarity among CF Developers?) this seemed like a pretty good fit.

Instead, I think it just entailed having some community names added to the board to show that they were involved but in reality none of the people listed had any say in anything, nor even had any idea what things were being put in each issue. We never saw any articles, or even previews of what a printed issue would look like. I would have even appreciated a free subscription for writing and editing articles, but I never got that either– it certainly wasn’t worth paying for. I saw the final version of magazines the same way everyone else does, by going to the PDF download site. As others have noted, we had no idea it was being shut down until the entry was posted at the CFDJ itself.

I really never went out of my way to promote the CFDJ or even write new articles for them because it didn’t seem like anything had changed. It fact, it only got worse as time went on– it was hard to even get any sort of e-mail response from anyone on SysCon on the editors mailing list as time went on.

That said, the board really put a lot of time and effort into trying to breathe life back into the publication, but it was for little to no gain. It is with a little sorrow however– I can remember when I was first getting started with CF how valuable the publication was. I’d say most of us were all ready to resign out of frustration, though it wouldn’t have really mattered since communicating with SysCon has been like talking to a black hole for quite some time.

I think the only way I can sum this up is– I for one welcome the Fusion Authority overlords.

The default Eclipse for Mac OS X font is kind of annoying since it’s way too big and reminds me of MS Comic Sans. If you try to replace it with one of the wonderful ProggyFonts without tweaking them first, you get stuck with anti-aliased fonts that look terrible. During my quest to get past this problem, I came across a way to setup a more programming friendly font in Mac OS X which uses one of the Proggy Fonts in aliased mode.

Although the above instructions aren’t terribly explicit, you can find the various Eclipse font settings under Eclipse > Preferences > General > Apperance > Colors and Fonts once you’ve installed the font and made the appropriate changes to your System Preferences.

Hey look, the public beta of ColdFusion 8 is now available for download at Adobe Labs. This is the beta you have been looking for.

I first noticed Ben Forta’s post about his site outage citing upgrading to the version of Scorpio being used for the public beta. Now with a couple of other vague posts by Raymond Camden and Damon Cooper, my best guess is that ColdFusion 8 will be available as a public beta as soon as tonight.

While doing my normal nightly browsing, I saw an “Open Source ColdFusion Server” digg which mentioned that the Smith Project, a free and lightweight CFML implementation, is going to be Open Sourced. This is great news for the community, and I’m definitely anticipating it’s release as an open source project.

Before I came across Smith a few months ago or so, I’d been long thinking about writing a Java based parser generator with support for a very limited subset of CFML type tags just to have a light markup language that could seamlessly call Java objects and services without the pain of JSP or overhead and cost of a full-featured CFML implementation. I think this will certainly fit that need for me once it’s open sourced, and will save me a lot of time from having to implement it myself.

On a related note, this is the first ColdFusion related digg I’ve seen that hasn’t turned into a “PHP/RoR PWNS COLDFUZION U N00B LOLZ” type discussion. Knock on wood.

Just a quick heads-up– my latest article in the ColdFusion Developers Journal is Why Interfaces in ColdFusion Are Irrelevant which was in the December issue. This article builds on an earlier post I made, and goes a different direction than those professing that CF shouldn’t have interfaces because it shouldn’t turn into Java-light.

A couple of weeks ago Sys-Con published various industry opinions of what we’d see in 2007 in many of it’s magazines. The article showed-up on Slashdot (with a misleading title) among other places and included various industry luminaries. A couple of people you might of heard of contributed to the article including David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) as well as myself. It looks like my response for the article was edited a bit for content length and doesn’t quite make sense in spots, so I thought I’d repost it in original form below:

My Technology Predictions for 2007

In general, I think this oncoming year will be one in which a lot technology built in the last several years becomes less of a burden, and more of a utility. That said, the top five technology trends I see happening in the new year are:

1. Server virtualization is just getting started, and will really make itself known in the coming year. Once we start seeing the quad core CPU architectures as a part of standard infrastructure, it really starts making a lot of sense to start deploying and managing servers and applications as virtual entities rather than specific pieces of hardware. This helps manage the cost and pain of software configuration management, take advantage of being able to process many tasks simultaneously because of hardware support, as well as allows legacy hardware to be retired in favor of applications running on virtual servers.

2. Container based hosting is the new kid on the block, and will also start making it’s presence known in the upcoming year. Commonly labeled as “grid” hosting (which is a technical misnomer if you understand distributed computing), it essentially claims to be an infinitely scalable hosting platform. This technology still seems to be half-baked at the moment, but you could have said the same thing about Linux ten years ago.

3. People who normally wouldn’t use Linux start to explore it and even replace Windows with it permanently. With Vista, Microsoft seems to be moving to a model in which the Windows operating system is a method to police users with DRM and other nonsense rather than provide developers a good platform on which to use hardware which is what Operating Systems are really supposed to be. A lot more consumers who haven’t noticed this happening in the past will stand-up and notice this year.

4. Dynamic languages and frameworks will continue to make leaps in popularity and adoption. Given the current squeeze on technology talent in the US, companies are going to have to learn how to do more with less resources. Moving to dynamic languages and frameworks as well as other simplification such as varying Agile software development practices will enable this to take place. I think the obvious leading candidates here are Ruby on Rails and Django.

5. The enterprise will embrace ways to simplify development by continuing to embrace open source software and Agile development strategies. While there are a lot of cries to the effect of Ruby on Rails replacing Java, I think that’s complete nonsense as Java is a language and Ruby on Rails is a framework. Rapid development languages will certainly make some inroads, particularly where heavy tools have been used to build simple applications, Java is still going to be a major part of the service oriented enterprise for years to come because of the power and tools it provides as well as it’s industry support.

The MySQL Performance Blog is posting about where you can download/build recent binaries of MySQL as it looks like they are no longer offering recent downloads. I’d have to say there is definitely evidence of this being true– I’m running 5.0.30-1 on my server this site is hosted on, yet the newest version available for download at the MySQL site is 5.0.27.

I’ve always been weary of the MySQL licensing scheme and have used PostgreSQL instead when possible, and if true this would be yet another reason I will continue to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL.