ColdFusion-Talk Roundup#1
by Kay Smoljak
This is the first of a weekly column, where Kay summarizes interesting and thought-provoking threads from the famous House of Fusion ColdFusion-Talk (CF-Talk) list.
ColdFusion 8 cluster testing for load balancing and failover (March 31)
George Lu had a question with regards to testing load balancing and failover on a newly-set-up cluster. James Holmes suggested looking at the individual server monitors for each instance in the cluster, hitting them, and then taking them down individually to see the requests appear on the other instance's monitor. Jochem van Dieten provided a code solution (showing the current JRun server name) and also recommended OpenSTA, jmeter or something similar for real world load testing. Jochem also explained briefly the difference between sticky sessions and session replication.
Query-based Verity collection with categories (April 1)
Azadi Saryev had a two-part question about Verity search collections: First, he wanted to know if categories were supported in Verity collections created from a database query; and second he was looking for advice on how best to structure a Verity collection for a multi-faceted photo database.
The thread was slow to get off the ground, and the first several respondents indicated that they had tended to avoid categories in their Verity implementations, as the feature was not well documented and in one poster's experience, did not perform as well as a query of queries on the returned dataset. Raymond Camden gave a conclusive answer for the first part of the question – that yes, categories were supported in any type of Verity collection. He agreed that categories sounded like a good solution to the structure question and suggested that Azadi check the Verity documentation – which sparked another round of responses about the lack of documentation for the feature. Dominic Watson suggested that performance testing would be key to finding the best possible solution. As of April 6, Azadi is still awaiting a response on an additional question on the CategoryTree argument, so it's likely that more discussion on this topic will be forthcoming.
ColdSpring Question (April 4)
Ryan J Heldt, a new user of the ColdSpring framework, had a question about dependency injection and session-scoped CFCs. Matt Williams suggested that ColdSpring was designed for application-scoped CFCs, and was not session aware. Mike Kear responded with a very thorough explanation of how a Facade can be used to solve Ryan's problem – a session-aware CFC that ColdSpring injects into any other CFCs that require the data it holds. He even provided some code samples to illustrate his points, making this a good thread to bookmark for users new to ColdSpring.
Deleting attachments immediately after CFMAIL (April 4)
In this thread, originally from October 2007, Nathan Wells was looking for a way to safely delete files that were created to be attached to a CFMAIL message, afterthat message had been sent. At the time, a simple solution was not forthcoming, although a solution using the JavaMail API was suggested.
The good news according to the original poster is that the newly released ColdFusion update 8.0.1 adds a remove attribute to both CFMAIL and CFMAILPARAM, to physically delete any attachments after a successful mail delivery. Thanks to Nathan for updating the thread for the benefit of other developers!
Kay is an all-round web developer who has been developing with ColdFusion since 2000. She runs Clever Starfish with her partner Dave and several very demanding cats, and sits on the committee of the Australian Web Industry Association. She is a regular writer for the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and a ColdFusion blogger on Sitepoint.com.
Thanks Kay, really appreciate your efforts to summarise the salient goings-on in the CF world here on on Sitepoint.
Very nice. One suggestion: provide a link to the thread over on the CF-Talk archive at houseoffusion.com.Thanks!
Mouse over the titles of each post in the article, and you'll see that they're links to the original threads on the CF-Talk archive. Thank you, Howard, for pointing out that this was not clear enough.Judith