Upgrading Railo and full CFScript support?

I have been running Railo for a few smaller side projects for a while. I have been happy with the performance and stability of Railo 3.0 but this week decided to upgrade my server to 3.1 the Open Source version. I really didn't want to remove the whole setup and start over and luckily I didn't have to as it's very easy to upgrade. Basically the way I did this was to download 3.1 ( at the time I upgraded 3.1.0.12 was the latest ) open the tar.gz ( I'm running the server version on debain ) and copy the jars some /lib to the /lib folder on my server. Stop railo then restart it. The whole process took a few minutes and I was running 3.1. Very impressive.

Later in the week 3.1.0.15 update was release and this was literally just a few clicks and I was running 3.1.0.15. In case you have never done this in the Railo admin pages log into the Server admin, click Update which is Under Services, and apply the update if there is one available. Yes its that easy!

I also upgraded the JDK to 1.6.13 at the same time but don't have anything really heavy to test any performance gains but I like to keep things upto date.

Now the main reason I wanted to upgrade is the BlazeDS integration and the ability to perform flash remoting with flex that just works. In 0.12 this worked for simple strings and number but trying to return a query just didn't work but with 0.15 this does work. A few people asked how I got this to work well its pretty easy and I plan to post a quick run through shortly.

I also asked one other question that makes me happy ( and I'm sure lots of others )

Will Railo support for cfscript like ColdFusion 9 will? and I got the answer I was looking for from Peter Bell.

Yes!

BTW here are the release notes if you missed them: Railo 3.1.0.15 release notes.

Internet Explorer 7 and Active X saved my BlackBerry

After reading John Gags post on a new BlackBerry app and talking with one of the guys at work I decided I would upgrade the OS on my BlackBerry. Well turns out I bricked my phone in the process. It hung just after it wiped the old OS and was in the process of re-loading the new jvm. Now I don't know if this was just bad luck or if Windows 7 was to blame but it just hung half way into the upgrade.

The phone would turn on and the red light would blink 3 times then 2 times over and over and that was it. After reading a number of threads 1, 2 , 3... etc

Nothing was working for me but I knew I had some hope as plugging in the BlackBerry and runnign the " LOADER /NOJVM " command would see my BlackBerry and stop the light blinking for a while.

I swapped between 2 computers ( Windows 7 64 bit, Windows Vista ) and as one of the reboots ( of which there were many ) I opened Internet Explorer rather then Fire Fox. I went to the BlackBerry site and found the update page to start re-downloading the Desktop Manager where there was an option to "Upgrade Now" using Active X. Hey I tried everything else so why not try this. I installed the active X control and up popped a window that looked just like the Desktop Manger software and the Operating system began to load. After 15 mins my phone rebooted and started up! All my data was wipped and I had to re-install my apps ( yes TwitterBerry was the first ) but it was working!

So there you have it Internet Explorer 7 and Active X saved the day!

A post to fill in the technical gaps

Well its been a long time between posts and here is what I have been upto.

Completed and released a large online video training system which caters for multiple languages which is now used across Europe, USA and Australia and soon to be Asia and India. ( if you have worked with multiple languages you'll know how much fun this can be ) Of course we wrote this in Flex with Coldfusion as the backend.

I've been in Australia for the past 3.5 weeks a great holiday you say? Well it was good to be in my home country but I only had 4 days that I wasn't at work. I'm still in Melbourne now but I fly out tomorrow morning. I'm looking forward to catching up on my shows I'm sure my DVR is full.

Catching up with family and friends while I'm in Melbourne.

Chasing up Learncf.com and Flexcf.com tutorials, of which I just released a new sample last night.

Working on a side project with Dale Fraser more about this later perhaps.

Spending time with our two new CF devs. Worked with our c++ dev on another Flex application that is looking awesome already ( yes our c++ dev is now coding in Actionscript and loving it ).

Took a look at Objective C not fun compared to actionscript, but iPhone possibilities are endless.

Oh and I also had a much needed week of a month ago where I caught up with a friend in Vegas. Good times.

I also spent time playing Ray Camdens Game One

I also wanted to sneak this in http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053 I'd still love to see Flexbuilder 4 for Linux as my main machine is still Win7 but I would appreciate being able to use linux full time.

Still accepting new tutorials from learncf and flexcf so feel free to contact me to send something through although I'm guessing with Flex4 and CF9 come out there will be a bunch of new topics to post about.

Oh and if your in the right time zone don't forget to check out Flextras Fridays 1pm EST with Jeffery Houser. I'll be there this Friday.