A week with Windows 7

The day windows 7 Beta was made publicly available I had to give it a go. I set it up in a VM to take a look around and it was not too dissimilar to Vista I spent little time really testing performance or compatibility. From earlier posts I have been thinking about moving to Vista 64 to take full advantage of my hardware ( C2D, 4g ram ) and last weekend I decided to back up my full dev environment, eclipse projects, make sure all my code was in SVN and reformat. Rather then use Vista 64 I decided to go for 64bit Windows 7.
And I love it. So far everything has worked without issue including:
IIS7
Coldfusion 8 ( 64bit )
Flexbuilder 3.2
Flash and the Flash debug players
SQL Server Enterprise manager
Smart svn
Office 2k7 suite
Skype
All my Air apps ( can't go one without Twitter )
Creative suit 4
Firefox
Core FTP
Dropbox
VMware Workstation
VLC
Putty
My 1 game ( Red Alert 3 )
Closing the lid of the laptop and resuming the session
My printer!!
and my custom Air apps.

Its fast, looks good and stable. The new task bar is great and it see's all my ram. When its fully released I will get a real key and throw Vista in the scrap heap.

BTW I also use a macbook and my desktop runs Debian etch so while I use MS for work I am familiar with Osx and *nix its just that at work Windows suits my needs.

Connecticut Coldfusion User Group My first CT CFUG.

Last night I attended the Connecticut Coldfusion User Group for the first time in person ( I was there last time via connect ). It was really nice to meet some more fellow CFers. I’m always looking for new ideas and better/different ways of approaching programming issues and open discussion among like minds usually results in a few good/new ideas surfacing.

The focus of the night was Railo 3.0 and the upcoming 3.1 Opensource release. Gert showed us many of the features of Railo including shortcuts’ in cfdump, cfvideoplayer and cfvideoright upto possibly the one that bought about the most discussing using ram as a file storage space. Gert demonstrated saving files ( in his example a .cfm file ) into a “virtual” ram drive. At the time most of asked each other why? then when I though about it I had a perfectly good reason and example. We use a lot and write dynamic images and charts out to disk to be able to use them when generating the pdf. Disk access is slow we all know that so writing temp files to ram is going to be many times faster I can see this being a usefull option to speed up a process such as this.

After the presentation we had brief discussion as why Railo and won’t Railo/Open DB always be playing catchup to CF. I suspect all three will play some catchup with each other but at this stage I think ColdFusion is still by far the leader and convincing a CTO to move from an application server by Adobe to a smaller company would be a bit of a battle. That being said the more CFML the better and it opens doors to new/intermediate developers, students, casual programmers if there are free engines available and when you need the Coldfusion only “bits” well then the cost of actually purchasing Coldfusion is not really that great considering how much development time you have saved.
I’ll keep playing with Railo ( hey my Flex datagrid to excel example runs on it ) but for my day job we will still be sticking to Adobe’s Coldfusion.

Coldfusion and JVM 1.6.0_11

A few of our servers were still running the 1.6.04 JVM. We do alot of statisical reports and analysis and we had a few reports that were getting longer and longer to run. We have spent time optimizing the code and have greatly reduced execution time we have also thrown beefier hardware at it but were always after more performance and there is nothing better then free performance. I spent some time reading about the JVM bugs and asked around and was advised to upgrade.

Now upgrading was fairly trivial I only had one problem as that was in the jvm.config I added the path like this:

<br />#java.home=C:/ColdFusion8/runtime/jre<br />java.home=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11\jre<br />

Which didn't work. I thought it was the space in between Program Files. So I tried:

<br />#java.home=C:/ColdFusion8/runtime/jre<br />java.home="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11\jre"<br />

Which also didn't work. Going back to basics:
<br />#java.home=C:/ColdFusion8/runtime/jre<br />java.home=C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_11/jre<br />

Worked perfectly. I was very happy with the results one report droped from 1 min 12s to less then a min which is close to 20%. I spent the last few days making sure everything was running fine and was reassured to read that Sean Corfield had just been through what I had and was also reporting success and speed increases.

I also upgraded a public facing site and had a friend click a few links make sure it was OK. I explain I had made some changes and asked if it was working ok he told me it was fine and also added "Dammmm that site is fast". Which made me smile.
So for us the upgrade has been a great success. How about everybody else? Any downfalls?




Special thanks to Matt Woodward and Dave Watts for spending some time with me on this.

P.S. One thing I will note is that down time for the change-over was literally the time to stop and start Coldfusion so about 1 minute. Everything can be put in place ready for the next start up.

Windows 7, Coldfusion and Apache

With seemingly everyone on the net trying Windows 7 I also decided to give it a go. Whats the first thing I wanted to try. Yep Coldfusion and I can confirm that it does infact install and work. I am running the 64 bit version with Apache 32 as the webserver.

Flex datagrids and Excel part 2

A few moths ago I write a post on extracting data from a flex datagrid see: HERE

I had several people contact me about this regarding extending functionality or how to get it into a file. At the time I was asked to implement the function the customer wanted it into the clipboard hence the copy/paste method I produced but I didn't think about how easy it would be to extend this to a downloadable file.

John Gag mentioned a method he uses which didn't quite work when I had date formatters. We currently generate many excel spreadsheets using HTML formatting to color code excel but I wanted a simpler version with no formatting/colors. Excel will automatically populate cells based on TAB delimited strings so I used my original method with a few changes and simply posted this back to Coldfusion ( or in this case Railo ) or PHP. ( I tested this in OSX with Excel, Windows with Excel and Ubuntu with Open Office and they all worked ).



View source is enabled: http://demo.kukiel.net/flex/copy/srcview/index.html

Demo: http://demo.kukiel.net/flex/copy/

And below is the CFML and PHP.
CFML:


PHP:


Now I'm sure this method could apply to asp, pl or any other server side language I just made it for the 2 I have available. The great thing about this method is that I can send any tab delimited data from a grid as a POST to my server without having to customize server side code in anyway.

The data being displayed in the grid comes directly from Full as a goog