I finished the switchover. In addition to moving VPS, I moved off of Resin and onto Tomcat. After dealing with some stuff in Tomcat, I wonder if Resin isn't better suited. Tomcat is really fussy/picky sometimes. More so on Windows than Linux. However, this whole ordeal was a great learning experience.

When I installed on CentOS, I just did a basic 'yum install tomcat5*' and it installed everything. This is where I ran into problems. Nothing was working correctly. I made a decision to get rid of it ('yum remove tomcat5*') and set it up manually myself.

The key thing to remember with tomcat, once you have it up and running is that you're going to want to make a environmental setting file called 'setenv.sh' - The {tomcat install dir}/bin/catalina.sh automatically looks for this file in the same directory.  This 'setenv.sh' file is responsible for telling tomcat where the JRE_HOME is located and other JVM memory options.

I have a couple of things to lock down, but I will be writing up a CentOS/Tomcat/Railo guide. Not that we need another one as they're pretty much the same instructions listed here along with the same resource links that I listed there as well. However, I threw one more thing into the mix. When I was at CFUnited, I managed to score a copy of Fusion Reactor. David Tattersall and crew was there next to the Railo booth and I watched / listened and pestered. I'm also going to get a twitter/plurk friend of mine get involved to get her thoughts on Fusion Reactor as well because I believe that a CF/Server Admin that can herd turkeys and servers for a living has to have some thoughts on Fusion Reactor.

I'm told that certain firewalls are blocking my domain because it has me rated as "mature" / "adult" -- I looked into one firewall software that was blocking my domain and they had no real way of getting ahold of a real person and so, my email went off into never never land. If you know my domain is being blocked by a particular firewall and you have alternative ways of contacting me, please do. I'd like to know the company that makes said firewall so I can contact them.

Technically, I've been here for years. So, what happened? Back in 2004 or so, my life got really busy. Right around that time, I was buying a house, dealing with severe work deadlines and my server hard drive that hosted my blog got the click of death thanks to some spammer that decided my box could handle 16,000 comment submissions per 6 seconds. If that wasn't stress enough, My 3 year old nephew passed away. I decided to just walk away and take a break. I even stepped down from Team Macromedia duties.

What year is it again? 2009? Whew. What have I been up to since then? You can read about that here if you're really curious.

The new blog

So, this is the new blog. It doesn't help that Jason Dean threatened to smack me with a ColdFusion 4.5 box which, if I recall correctly, has 2 thick printed manuals inside in addition to the install CD. I've put up Mango Blog. I'm not 100% crazy about Mango, but seeing as I had Railo installed on my server and setting up a Mango Blog is pretty darn easy (1-2 clicks). I'm sure that someone will ask. This does mean that I have no interest in digging up my past blog data lingering around on a burnt cd and resurfacing it. It's a clean slate. A new beginning. Too much has changed and I doubt any of it was relevant these days.

I will be mostly blogging about the following topics: jQuery, Adobe AIR, Adobe ColdFusion, Railo and CFML.

The Death of a CF Developer, the birth of a CFML Developer

Prior to June 2009, I happily called myself a ColdFusion developer. I worked with Adobe ColdFusion, day in and day out at work and even at home. I remained involved in the ColdFusion Community by reading RSS Feeds actively, leaving comments on blogs, being involved on Twitter and being a alpha/beta tester of ColdFusion releases.

ColdFusion 8 expanded my world with the introduction of the ajax tags. I wasn't completely happy with them, but it was an awesome introduction to ajax. I had been happily ignoring javascript until ColdFusion 8. After releasing a project at work that used the CF8 ajax capabilities, I continued digging around and latched onto jQuery, which is another topic I'll probably be blogging a lot about.

My world expanded a little more when my sysadmin at work had setup Railo 3.0 on a server because he didn't want to purchase another Adobe ColdFusion server and he just wanted some simple xml files crunched. I had no idea what Railo's capabilities were and I thought this would be a great opportunity to do so and it'd give me a chance to check it out. Created a simple little CFC to parse the XML Files and insert/create report. Railo's speed intriqued me. I kept digging into it. I started porting over a ColdFusion 8 codebase over to it, bumped into several errors. Upon closer inspection, these errors were dumbass mistakes on my part, such as... <cfset var something = SomeFunction()> and SomeFunction() wasn't cfreturn'ing anything. Railo didn't like that, but ColdFusion 8 silently accepted it and moved on. I'm actually being tired of being hand held. I want real errors. All of them. I don't consider myself a bad coder at all, but I do make little mistakes and don't think they should be silently accepted.

Then, I started digging into the administration of Railo and saw several features that made sense. I daresay I was actually upset that they weren't available in ColdFusion 8. I waffled for several weeks about kicking ColdFusion 8 Standard off my box and the deal was pretty much solidified when I moved to Slicehost and tried to install everything on 64 bit CentOS. I knew that CF8 Standard was 32 bit and the hoops that I had to jump through on a barebone 64 bit CentOS wasn't worth it. Finally, I decided that because I had Railo running on my local dev machine, I might as well follow through on my VPS.  Also, considering that I was paying $600 for a server upgrade to run a blog, among other little internal apps is pretty STUPID. Never again!

At work, we run Adobe ColdFusion 8 Enterprise and Standard. We have a single Railo server in the background. This is probably never going to change and, that's ok! My boss will always want a stable big company to stand behind and Adobe is pretty big and stable. Elsewhere, I'm using Railo for pretty much everything.

Railo inspired me enough to log into my long forgotten moderator account at ultrashock.com, a community heavily slanted towards Flash & PHP developers. I made a post titled, Open Source CFML targeting PHP developers. Within a span of months, big announcements started happening. OpenCFML.org was announced. March 31st - Railo 3.1 was going Open Source (LGPL v2). Soon after, Mark Drew, Peter Bell and Sean Corfield joined Railo.

Around the time of CF.Objective() in 2009, I was complaining to Sean Corfield about lack of documentation and that Railo really needs a community manager to start addressing several issues and fill the communication gap. Sean mentioned that this was very good feedback and that he would bring them up at the Railo Team meeting. He then asked me, "Are you volunteering?" My initial response was no. The more I kept working with Railo, the more I wanted to get involved. June 2009, I made a big leap. I stepped up as Volunteer Community Manager for Railo. Response was positive for the most part.

At CFUnited, I made the distinction that I'm a CFML developer. I feel it is an important distinction and some of you may agree. Some of you will think it's a silly distinction and that they're one and the same to which we'll have to agree to disagree. Joe Reinhart's speech "CF is Dead, Long Live CF!" at CFUnited solidified it for me. I'm sure that some of you will see this as me drawing a line in the sand. Unfortunately, the line was already drawn and it wasn't by me.

I will introduce and recruit for new CFML developers outside of the CFML Community. I think having Railo & Open Bluedragon as options will make it easier for them to accept CFML. Matt Woodword's recent announcement of BlazeDS integration is great news for Open BlueDragon. I will continue to push the CFML Community to take a look at Railo.

I will blog.