If you start to use the new Adobe Presentations service, an online presentation-building tool, now at labs.adobe.com, you may want to engage in some discussion with other users, so may go looking for some forums. You may struggle as I did.

Sadly, there's none for it listed at the acrobat.com forums page. Perhaps that's because Presentations is still in lab status.

There's also none listed in the Help menu for Presentations. There is a link to share feedback, which gives you an email address. That's better than nothing, but it's not a discussion forum. Some may even fear using it if it might be a black hole.

I decided to go ahead use that feedback address. I was delighted to get a response pretty quickly (well, first an automated one, and then a real person).

But what surprised me most was that the automated email (offered in response to using that feedback address) offered the URL for the forum!

So where is the forum? It's at: http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/presentations/.

I responded that this link really ought to be listed in the Help menu of Presentations, but that suggestion seems to be challenge for them to implement. Oh well. I decided to share the info here, and also as a comment in a blog entry on Presentations in the Acrobat.com blogs.

Just seems it shouldn't be so hard to find these forums.

If you're not yet on the bandwagon :-), please consider it. Membership is entirely free. Just sign up at the site. It gets you email notification about the meetings, as well as the chance to share feedback on meetings they attend.

Of course, you don't need to join to attend the meetings. The RSS feeds for those are available free on the site, and the meetings are announced on twitter as well, via @cfmeetup. So we technically have even more members, unofficially.

But if you'd like to help us grow to the next 1,800 members, and more important, if you would like another avenue for learning more about CF and related technologies, please consider signing up. There's no obligation, and you're in total control of your membership experience.

About the CF Meetup

The CF Meetup is an official Adobe CF user group. Unlike most groups, we meet weekly (and sometimes twice!) on Thursdays at noon or 6pm US EDT (GMT -4, as of the date of this posting).

We have speakers from all over the world on all kinds of topics related to CF, whether new or classic topics, beginner or advanced; whether new or old presentations, or even new or experienced speakers. If you or anyone you know would like to present, there are always open slots sometime in the coming months.

We've now had 88 presentations since I took the reins from Steven Erat in April 2007. You can find links to all the titles, descriptions, and speaker bios, as well as recordings of the sessions, at recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com (or on my UGTV repository of nearly 400 recorded presentations from over 200 speakers).

(If you're not familiar with the value of thread dumps or stack traces, read on. The resources I point to get help you to appreciate their usefulness.)

Well, I was tooling around looking for some help on a topic when I happened upon an old entry from the awesome and ever-valuable blog of Steven Erat, formerly of Adobe and now of Webapper. The entry is An easier way to take ColdFusion thread dumps on Windows , and he actually points to entry in another classic blog by Brandon Purcell (formerly of Adobe and now with Universal Mind). Steven's entry also points to a classic Adobe technote on interpreting dumps and stack traces.

But both entries are from 2005, and since then there are still easier solutions for getting either a thread dump or stack trace, and I wanted to point them out (I'll also add a link to this entry in Steven's.)

For those on CF 6, 7, 8

First, for those running CF 6, 7, 8 (and other CFML engines, like Railo and Open BlueDragon), you can use either FusionReactor or SeeFusion, commercial monitoring tools, which each offer a simple single button to produce a thread dump (a stack trace for all threads running inside the JVM that underlies CF).

Better still, they also offer an option to get a stack trace for a single running CFML page request.

For those on CF 8 Enterprise

If you're on CF 8 Enterprise, you can take advantage of its Server Monitor, which also offers the ability to get a thread dump, by way of its "snapshots" feature.

I discuss the Server Monitor in a 4-part series of articles for Adobe, starting here.

Part 3 of the series discusses Snapshots in particular.

(I also have an an article introducing FusionReactor.)

The CF 8 Server Monitor can also provide the stack trace of a given request, but you need both "start monitoring" and "start profiling" to be enabled. If they are, you can see currently running requests in the Active Requests screen, and if you click on one, the stack trace appears in the middle of the request detail page.

But maybe you don't need to do a thread dump at all

All that said, I should point out that one of the values of thread dumps was to see what requests were running, which is incredibly valuable.

But if you do get either FusionReactor or SeeFusion, or can use the CF8 Enterprise Server Monitor, note that they all have a feature to show what requests are running.

That, alone, can be what you really want to know, and their interface is a LOT easier to read than a thread dump. :-) And the stack trace feature let's you see exactly what line of CFML code a request is running at the time you request the stack trace.

Thread dumps are still valuable

Still, thread dumps can still be valuable. For one thing, you may not always be on the server when you want to see what's running. Both FusionReactor and the CF8 Monitor have an option to trigger sending you a thread dump by email when certain conditions are met (too many requests, requests taking too long, too little memory, etc.).

Also, sometimes a problem is not caused by a running CF request. It could be another thread that's having a problem, whether one of the scheduler threads (which are used for background tasks like the client variable purge process), or cf-thread threads (used by CFTHREAD in CF8), and so on.

A tool to help analyze thread dumps

Indeed, Steven would also want to point out that Webapper (makers of SeeFusion) also have a free online tool called SeeStack which can help analyze thread dumps to make them a little easier to read.

Still more on thread dumps and stack traces

Further, the Adobe technote that Steven points to, Debugging thread dumps and server problems in ColdFusion MX 6.1 and 7.0, also gives considerable insight into understanding stack traces and thread dumps. It's also quite old and doesn't talk about things with respect to the more modern tools I've mentioned, but the information is valuable whether you use them or not.

In fact, much of it is about understanding stack traces (remember: a thread dump is a list of stack traces for all threads in the JVM), and connecting the dots in what they report and specific possible problems in your code or configuration.

I plan to do some entries in the near future, walking through use of these tools to solve common problems of CF servers being unavailable. Until then, check out also the "related entries" listed at the bottom of Steven's entry.

Of course, there are many other fine classic blog entries (and bloggers) who talk about CF troubleshooting, too. I also plan to offer something to help with finding those.

• How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression
• How To Optimize Your Site With HTTP Caching
• How To Debug Web Applications With Firefox
• Using JSON to Exchange Data
• How To Make a Bookmarklet For Your Web Application
• The Quick Guide to GUIDs

A few focus on Javascript and/or site building:

• Speed Up Your Javascript Load Time
• Speed Up Your Javascript, Part 2: Downloadable Examples!
• A Simple, Comprehensive Overview of Javascript

Still others aren't specific to web development, but can be valuable to all kinds of developers, and it was one of these that led me to the site in the first place:

• A Visual Guide to Version Control
• Intro to Distributed Version Control (Illustrated)
• Keeping your data backed up

The site is Better Explained, whose tag line is "Explanations for everyone". The author does a pretty good job of that. Some of the topics are a little too one-sided (the discussion of HTTP compression does only show setting it up in Apache, not IIS), and of course there's no mention of CF anywhere. :-) But we can't expect that from everyone. There are lots of positive comments and linkbacks on on many of the entries, so he'd done a good job in the eyes of most.

Indeed, if you may be hearing the siren call of Ruby on Rails, they have an article on that: Starting Ruby on Rails: What I Wish I Knew. There's also an intro to MVC, but again it's from a Rails perspective: Intermediate Rails: Understanding Models, Views and Controllers.

If there's something you'd like to see the author address on the site, he has a post for that, too: What do you want Better Explained?.

"The Best of Both Worlds: Java Backends with CFML Frontends" with Matt Woodward

Thursday, June 25, 12pm US EDT (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

All CF Meetup meetings are recorded, and the URLs are all listed on the recordings page and UGTV site, both of which are updated after each meeting.

Call for speakers

If you may be interested or know someone who is (or you may want to suggest someone you think I should ask), have them view this past blog entry or get in touch with me.

"ColdFusion Uptime, All The Time", with Mike Brunt

Thursday, June 18, 12pm US EDT (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

"An Object Oriented Approach to Validations", with Bob Silverberg

Thursday, June 18, 6pm US EDT (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

All CF Meetup meetings are recorded, and the URLs are all listed on the recordings page and UGTV site, both of which are updated after each meeting.

Call for speakers

If you may be interested or know someone who is (or you may want to suggest someone you think I should ask), have them view this past blog entry or get in touch with me.

This is not an introduction to Eclipse, and it's not about features in CFEclipse, so it may interest those who've long used CFEclipse but not the Adobe extensions. Yet it also doesn't presume prior experience with Eclipse or CFEclipse, so it's for pretty much everyone. And if you plan to be using Bolt, you'll want to attend since these extensions are included among the many features that Adobe has listed as coming Bolt.

Introducing the Adobe ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse Whether you're already using Eclipse (via CFEclipse or not), or you've still not gotten into using it (or are waiting for Bolt), this talk if for you, if you don't know about the Adobe CF Extensions for Eclipse. Not to be confused with the CFEclipse plugin, the Adobe ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse are a free set of very useful tools (for the free Eclipse editor) that many have missed, even if they do use CFEclipse. And if you don't yet use CFEclipse, these additional tools may offer features that might make you reconsider using Eclipse for CFML coding.

In this session, veteran CFer Charlie Arehart will introduce the extensions (not CFEclipse), including how to find and install the extensions from the Adobe site, as well how to use them to do many things: browse datasources and build queries, generate code using wizards, browse CFCs and web services, view log files, debug CF apps (discussed only briefly and supported only for CF8), and more.

Note that most of the features shown apply to if you're using CF7 as well. And since the upcoming new Adobe editor, codenamed Bolt, incorporates these same features (and many more, as discussed on the labs site), this talk will help you whatever your current or future plans.

Learn more about the event, including optional RSVP, a link to create calendar entries, and more, at the Meetup event page. You can also just show up on the day at the meetup Connect room.

There will be a 6pm (EDT) talk as well, by Sean Shroeder of Mura, introducing the Mura (formerly Sava) open source CMS. For more on these, and all CF Meetups, see my category of blog announcements about them.

Hope to see some of you Thursday at noon. I think most would learn something new. :-)

"Introducing the Adobe ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse", with Charlie Arehart

Thursday, June 11, 12pm US EDT (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

"Mura CMS: What's in it for me?", with Sean Schroeder

Thursday, June 11, 6pm US EDT (GMT-4)

Meeting description, details, optional RSVP

All CF Meetup meetings are recorded, and the URLs are all listed on the recordings page and UGTV site, both of which are updated after each meeting.

Call for speakers

If you may be interested or know someone who is (or you may want to suggest someone you think I should ask), have them view this past blog entry or get in touch with me.