Been a while since I posted anything to the blog, so thought I'd pass on some useful links and tools I've been using recently.

The first is the awesome CF411 site maintained by Charlie Arehart. This is a compendium of links to all kinds of ColdFusion tools, blogs, articles, tutorials, just about anything you might need if you are a ColdFusion developer (or if you just dabble). It's a HUGE resource that everyone that works with CF should have bookmarked.

CFQuickDocs is a really nice online ColdFusion documentation reference done using Ajax. Much faster and easier to pull up tag and function reference and easily swap the CF versions as well.

Local Raleigh CF'er Jim Priest gave a presentation at CFUnited on automation for the CF developer. Included many of the tools and tips that I use myself such as Find and Run Robot, AutoHotKey, LastPass, Lazarus, etc. Check it out here.

If you do any development work for clients, learning to use source control is something you should look into. There are a variety of excellent hosting companies that offer SVN and/or Git hosting, Codesion. is one that is very popular and that I use myself. Recently someone pointed me to another option, Unfuddle which not only hosts your repositories, but provides some really top-notch project management and ticket tracking as well, all for very reasonable prices.

Finally, recently I was having a major problem debugging a Flex remoting issue. I ended up solving it by using an HTTP debugging proxy tool. It occurred to me that this may be a really useful tool for many CFWebstore developers as well, if you work with any portions of the code that interact with external servers, like shipping or payment gateways. Basically an HTTP proxy can show you all the data passing back and forth and greatly assists when trying to determine where a problem might be occurring. My favorite proxy tool is Charles which has excellent capabilities and a really nice clean interface, but it does cost $50 to purchase. Under the free category, you'll find Fiddler which is a free proxy done by Microsoft that is fairly widely used and has many plugins available as well.

Well, that's about all I have. Feel free to post your favorite tools in the comments (spam will be removed!)

Not long ago I got an email from a customer having a strange problem with his store. Whenever someone checked a box to remove an item from the shopping cart, the store would throw an error. Reviewing the error dump showed a strange null null error. We've seen this in ColdFusion for some time but in the past, they are usually not very reproducible unless there's an error in the code causing a null value. On review though, we could not find anything causing it, the code and all queries involved didn't show any null values anywhere.

We did a fair amount of detective work trying to find the cause, and I tried multiple ways to code around it, but the best I could achieve was to reduce the frequency that the error occurred. There was simply no way to do the function without that update being in there at some point and the database continued to routinely dump a null error when it got to it. We updated ColdFusion to version 9 to see if that helped, and tried a different MySQL connector as well, with no luck.

Finally, we decided to upgrade the MySQL to the latest version. It was already on a fairly recent release, but there didn't seem to be any other possible cause for it. And bingo, the error is gone! We're not sure exactly what MySQL was having an issue with, but it does seem this recalculation error is due to some bug in MySQL.

So if you run across this error, try updating the MySQL version and that should take care of it. We have seen the error in a couple different 5.1.3x versions and it does not seem to occur in 5.1.4x.

If you update to the latest version of the Firefox browser, you may find the WYSIWYG editor in your store will disappear. This is due to a bug in the FCKEditor that is used for this component, it has a browser compatibility check that only goes up to the year 2009! Here's information on how to correct this if you are effected. You'll find the editor in the customtags/fckeditor directory of your store.

FCKEditor Year 2010 Bug

I've had a number of requests to create a Facebook Fan page for CFWebstore, so here you go! I'll be posting from time to time there with important updates, news, blog posts, etc. so a great way for you Facebook users to stay informed on the latest CFWebstore news and to network with other users as well. So here's link, looking forward to seeing lots of fans on there soon!

CFWebstore Facebook Fan Page

Readers of this blog know I've been a big fan of the Railo open source CFML server engine. Open BlueDragon also continues to improve and has good support from the community. Now we have the new ColdFusion 9 release from Adobe as well to be excited about! I particularly love the new ORM/Hibernate features. It will be sometime before many of these new features make their way into CFWebstore (since the product will continue to support older CF versions for sometime) but there's one new feature of CF9 you can take advantage of now...speed! One thing that has impressed me so much with Railo was how much faster it ran sites versus CF8 and OBD. CF9 has definitely closed the gap in areas, particularly with object creation. We are seeing some very basic speed comparison tests posted to various ColdFusion blogs which you may find interesting, if you are look to migrate to one of these servers.

Unoffical Speed Test

CFC Creation Time

Object Creation Test

On another note, did you know there is a host offering Railo hosting? Check it out!

Alurium.com

Vivio Technologies also offer both Railo and Open BlueDragon as options on their Linux VPS plans. If you are up for running your own server, this is one of the cheapest options and gives you great performance that blows shared hosting out of the water!

Vivio Technologies