SOTR2010 Day 1 notes

Scotch On The Rocks 2010

I was lucky enough to attend this years SOTR and just like last years, I’ve come back bursting with all these ideas and thoughts!  He’s my collection of information I was interested in and scribbled down.  So remember, this won’t cover everything

Sessions

Adobe Keynote (Terry Ryan)

• EULA changes in CF9 explained.
  • Production licenses cover any development / staging installations too.
  • Cloud licensing is more flexible.
  • Active – passive set ups are covered.
• CF 9.0.1
  • CfDbInfo has been CfScript’ed.
  • ORM gets multiple datasource lovin’.
  • HQL has been introduced to the CfQuery tag.
• ColdFusion Builder
  • Apptacular extension for scaffolding.
  • RIAForge has a good collection of extensions, they obviously want us to make more.
• Flash Catalyst
  • Looks cool but not something I can see myself using right now.

I was disappointed that Flash Catalyst took up such a chuck on time, especially considering that there was a session on it later for anyone who wanted to learn more.  Honestly I’d have love to have heard more about the future of ColdFusion and CFBuilder.  Also it’d have been nice to know about any community efforts Adobe is making or plans, more information about the public bug trackers and especially anything that involves Adobe listening to us developers asking for new features (I know we can submit stuff to the bug tracker, but it doesn’t seem the right place and the time I tried it I didn’t get much of a response back or chance to try and explain).

Mastering the CF Application Framework (Ben Nadel)

• All about how flexible the application.cfc is and examples of this.
• Showed how you can intercept requests and process them uniquely.
• Workaround the Flash / CFSession problem.
• There are ways and means to have sessions for cookieless clients without using URL parameters.
• Turning your server session cookies into browser session only.
• Examples on cookie encryption / decryption.
• Excellent description and workaround for an issue with onSessionStart and multiple requests (helped me with an existing problem).
• Methods for handling search engine bots that don’t support cookies and start a session per request.

I’ll freely admit that I’m a fan of Ben and his blog.  I think he’s very good at thoroughly investigating things and explaining what he’s encountered.  I think Ben’s nerves might have shown a little but it didn’t take anything away from what I thought was a fantastic presentation.

4.0 Features on the Railo Express (Gert Franz)

• 3.2
  • Full scripting support.
  • Caching features:
    • ehCache
    • memcached
    • couchDb
    • and others…
  • Ajax tags supported.
  • Dead simple ways of updating Railo.
  • Event gateways
    • CFML supported
  • ORM (Hibernate)
    • Settings are configurable in the admin.
  • Railo Extension Store
• 4.0
  • Performance forcused.
  • Java objects are extendable with CFML.
  • Web services can be extended.
  • CfScript supports Java,
  • CLIR – Command Line Railo!
    • Ideas put forward like PDF generation.
    • Useful for deployment scripts.
    • Cut down as it doesn’t have to worry about “requests”.
    • Writes back to a file or system out (console).
  • Functions can be cached via an attribute.
    • Cache is related to the argument values.
  • Abstract functions.
  • Store application / session scopes.
  • CFEclipse – Railo!?
  • CfRety
  • Autotuning!?
  • Proposes code optimisations.
  • GZip output.
  • CFTimeout tag.

I’m starting to think that Gert listens in on the Adobe keynotes at SOTR events and then proceeds to quickly make his presentation completely awesome by comparison.  Gert is great at hosting a session and the information that Railo decide to give out is fantastic.  I suppose that Adobe will always find it difficult to compete with that amount of openness due to Railo being open source and having that advantage.  Railo has fast become a pet fave and I’d love to get the chance to use it a lot more than I currently do.

Measuring Performance Improvements In CF Apps With Effective N-Tier Caching (Mike Brunt)

Mike? Any chance of a shorter title next time

• Always important to consider the “data distance”.
• The closer something is cached to the client, the better.
• nginx, Squid, AICache and others are useful for content caching.
• 32-bit gets CF about 1.4GB, 64-bit copes very nicely up to 32GB (might handle more but Mike seemed to suggest issues or untested).
• If you’re using enterprise ColdFusion, always install in multi-server mode.
• Try to keep complex objects out of server, application and session scopes for better memory stability.
• Query caching is good but difficult to manage.
• Trusted / Template cache can give a good performance boost:
  • Number of templates should be greater than or equal to the number of templates on your server / instance.
  • Only use if you aren’t constantly updating templates.
• Cache the component paths.
• ehCache
  • Runs within ColdFusion JVM.
  • Better to run it outside in it’s own JVM.
  • Can have several ehCache’s, including remote ones.
• ORM / Hibernate caching can be used as well (memcached).
• Metrics logging
  • Little to no footprint so can be used on production without worry.
  • Can use this to monitor threads.
• Always set a start heap size (96MB recommended).
• Good idea to check JRun logs to see what’s going on.
• Avoid session replication, it just doesn’t work (heard this A LOT at SOTR2010).
• Always load test your applications.
• Mike has seen servers handling 150 concurrent threads without issues, suggests at least 35 and can’t understand why Adobe leave it set so low by default.
• As soon as ColdFusion starts running out of threads the performance will take a huge nose dive.
• Don’t believe any threads per processor myths you’ve heard due to the nature of having Java as a base.
• Be careful with frameworks due to the amount of CFC’s and objects they can sometimes load into scopes.
  • Probably a good suggestion to stick with a single framework and not mix them in the same instance.
• Believes it’s safer to change the jvm.config file for memory settings than using the CFIDE/Administrator.
• Great article in Fusion Authority that’s related to some of the topics covered.

Blimey, can Mike talk or what?  I loved the fast pace he set out and how his slides said plenty but he said a huge amount more.  I think it’s important sometimes to get more information from listening to the speaker waffle on than you can from just downloading some well explained presentation files afterwards.  The amount of information Mike gave out had me scribbling at a furious pace!  Another great session

Creating and Using ColdFusion portlets (Mark van Hedel)

• Portlets and portals.
• For an example of what a portal is, see iGoogle as an example.
• Portlets usually contain only a small amount of data.
• Portals allow users to position, display and customise a set of portlets that are available to them.
• The are various Portal servers available, the JBoss one was used for this session.
• ColdFusion can create portlets by creating a CFC that extends the portlet class.
  • A set of pre-defined methods can then be built.
  • Each method is given information on the current state of the portlet.
  • Can have their own design.
  • View, edit, help, min and max statuses.

Unfortunately this session wasn’t really for me.  I gave it a go out of interest to see what it’s all about after seeing portlets mentioned in CF9.  Mark did a good job with the presentation though and I’m not saying anything against him, I just can’t see myself using this for anything in the near future.

Supercharge your ColdFusionBuilder (Ray Camden)

• Snippets
  • Can be more useful than people think.
• Extensions
  • Available on RiaForge.
  • He has written one called Mirror that looks extremely useful for anyone developing extensions to see what’s going on.
  • Extensions can hook into several places for interacting with files, folders, database tables, projects, right clicks…
  • Demonstrated installing extensions.
  • Walked through methods for providing dialogs and inputs.
  • jQuery can be used.
  • Flex could be included.
  • There are some issues that he’s reported to Adobe.

I thought Ray’s session was pretty good, especially the images in his presentation.  The example code was well thought out and Ray explained everything really well.  I don’t think I’m going to get into developing extensions for CFBuilder just yet as I haven’t got a copy at the moment (feel free to donate me one… anyone? ).  This is a fantastic looking feature though and by the looks of things, the hardest part of developing an extension for CFBuilder will be coming up with an idea in the first place.  Nice one Ray.

Day 1 thoughts

I really enjoyed day 1.  The sessions were worth going to, although I would have swapped to track 2 for the portlet one as it wasn’t really for me.  Wish I was there the day before and wasn’t so tired but thanks to the free bar plenty of Red Bull kept me ticking over long enough (other energy drinks are available ).  Very happy to win a FuzzyOrange hoody in the raffle and have a squeeze of a reachie glove, although seeing chufftyness (technical term) dropped after seeing them practical throw stuff at us so they didn’t have to take it back to Scotland.  Still wore my hoody once I got back home late and it was chilly

Just like everyone else, it was great to finally see people in person.

I’ll try and get Day 2 notes up soon