The last few days I have spend some time setting up 2 new servers. One running Railo on Ubuntu and the other Coldfusion in Windows. I needed to host this on a single IP address and needed both machines available on the internet. There are 2 ways I know of that can accomplish this task 1. Using Microsoft ISA and 2 Using Apache as a reverse proxy. As I already have Apache up and running I went with option 2. While a seemingly trivial task I had never done this before and got hung up a few times the following are the steps I took:

Define the urls you want to re-direct to a different server:

  ServerName www.myExternalDoomianName.com
  ProxyPass / http://myInternalDnsName/    ( or ip address )
  ProxyPassReverse / http:// myInternalDnsName /  (or ip address )
  ProxyPreserveHost on

ProxyPreserveHost keeps the host headers intact so the internal sever can still use virtual websites.
Enable the site ( debian/ubuntu specific )

A2ensite myReverseProxySites

Need some extra bits for apache:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-proxy-html
a2enmod proxy
a2enmod proxy_html
a2enmod headers
a2enmod proxy_connect
a2enmod proxy_balancer

Restart apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If something isn’t working start looking in the logs:

tail -f  /var/log/apache2/error.log

I write a lot of data-focused applications, a lot of grids, reports updates and inserts. It’s the usual stuff the business wants, Flex and Coldfusion work really well together for this sort of thing. We produce quite a few custom reports using the often unknown little gem that comes for free with cf Coldfusion Report Builder. It can be clunky but I doubt there is a quicker way to produce what we need.
When all this is said and done and we are happy with what we have produced ( and so is the business of course ) they seem to inevitably come back with “This report is great, any chance I can get it in excel?”
As per usual it was required ASAP. We already write out several reports into excel but each report is different and I was after a generic solution. I was directed to this article by Dale Fraser: http://www.cflex.net/showfiledetails.cfm?ObjectID=298
Which didn’t really work and had a few issues not surprising it was for Flex 1. Plus I felt that all the HTML was unnecessary and I was after a cleaner simpler solution. I didn’t want to restrict the use to IE either so the js was to go aswell. What I came up with was a solution that loops the datagrid columns ( hidden and seen ) and produces a tab separated block of text that will paste into excell perfectly separating the grid columns into nice excel columns. It even takes into consideration label functions. The accountants where happy and could now paste into excel with 1 click and manipulate the data in anyway they want.
You can see an example of this where I grab the rss feed from fullasagoog and tidy it up a bit and put it in a grid. Let the grid load up, click copy, open excel, click in a cell and paste. It works on mac and windows ( I’ll assume linux my desktop is at home so I cant test ) in ie, safari and firefox.
http://code.kukiel.net/dgc
I also enabled code view.