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!)

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

We're continuing to see malware injection attacks against ColdFusion sites. The latest attack used the public upload in the popular Galleon software. Read the details here:

How Galleon Was Hacked

It appears to be the same user(s) as the ones that have attacked CFWebstore and FCKEditor installations, so they clearly are continuing to shift tactics in order to infect ColdFusion sites in new ways, and also change the file names they use to upload to sites, so be sure to check for *any* sites that have upload features that the hackers could make use of.

Those of you on the CFWebstore Yahoogroup probably know what a fan of Railo I am. This CFML server has really impressed me and we are running several clients on it with great success. Now with it being open source, that makes it even more attractive for stores looking to keep their costs low (and these days, that's most of us!) Combine the free Community version of Railo with a low-cost VPS server from someplace like KickAssVPS and you have a site that will blow away the performance you get on typical CF shared hosting, and at basically the same price! Get Franz of Railo will be presenting at the Online ColdFusion Meetup on Thursday, Jan. 29, drop by and see what Railo has to offer you.

We had the pleasure of hosting Gert Franz from Railo at our small central PA user group on July 31. He gave us a run-down of Railo for those that were new to it and demonstrated a bunch of the new features. I was particularly impressed with what they will be able to do leveraging Hibernate, and the ability to use just about anything as an archive and thus a virtual filesystem. The demos of the cfvideo/cfvideoplayer in conjunction with using an Amazon S3 to offload the majority of the load away from the webserver were also very cool. As one person put it, "I could do my own YouTube in 15 minutes!" Well, maybe a little longer than that, but it was pretty neat nonetheless. The video tags will not be part of the open source version coming later this year however, so will be interested to see what it will cost to use them.

I am currently running a client site on Railo and we seem to have worked out the few minor bugs with it on CFWebstore, and continue to be highly impressed with its speed, so I encourage everyone to look into it and what it offers. I think we are really going to be hearing more and more about Railo particularly once the open source is release on JBoss later this year, and this US tour is designed to really show CF developers what it has and get them excited about it. If you are looking at moving to a VPS or dedicated server, and the cost of ColdFusion is a big concern, Railo may be just the thing for you. Gert is also a member of the new CFML Advisory board so we can expect that they will continue to work hard to be compatible with Adobe ColdFusion as well. Talking with Gert you really are impressed by how strongly they believe in working as a community and attracting more people to the platform, rather than taking a "divide-and-conquer" approach. Exciting times for the CF community indeed!