I'm speaking on the CFMeetup this week: "Getting Started with Multiple Instances in CF"

Note: This blog post is from 2009. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

You may think, "what's new about that?" Well, nothing. I've just had people ask for more beginner/intermediate and more admin-related talks. This seemed to fit the bill for both. Here's the (detailed) description (to make sure the right audience shows up).

Introducing the Adobe ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse

Have you wondered about using or trying out the "multiple instance" feature of CF (technically the "multiserver" installation option). Available in its current form since CF 7, many developers and shops still have not adopted it, perhaps because they don't understand its benefits, or maybe they tried it and got confused about the options during installation/configuration. Or maybe they assume it's only about creating clusters/load balancing and/or replication: it's not and can be valuable for many other reasons.

In this talk, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will introduce the topic, presuming you have no prior experience with it. (Note that while it's a feature of CF Enterprise, you can also use it with the free Developer edition, and he'll explain why you may want to.)

What we will (and will not) cover:

We'll address things from the ground up, starting with what the feature is, how it's evolved, and why you should use it in development and/or production. Charlie will demonstrate an installation from scratch, talking about the various choices presented, and proceeding to add another instance and how to demonstrate successful setup. He'll also show connecting the new instance(s) to an external web server and share tips about that.

Along the way Charlie will address such other practical concerns as how to share admin settings among the instances, whether and how to share jvm.config settings, how to find the various logs for each instance, why to be careful about scheduled tasks, how you can monitor the instances, and more. He'll also offer some recommendations that could vary depending on your setup, such why you might want to use the cfusion instance only for creating instances, when/why you may be able to stop and disable the cfusion and admin instances, why you may/may not want to consider sandbox security, and more.

We will not have time to discuss or demonstrate clustering, load balancing, and replication, but can mention it only briefly. If that may be what you'd want to hear more about, please know this is not the talk for that. Perhaps a later talk.

But you will be pointed to many resources available for you to further investigate more on all the things we discuss (with a warning to be careful about older resources which describe an older but still-supported approach to multiple instances, from the CF 6.1 timeframe.)

So were you surprised that the "simple" subject actually has a lot more nuance than meets the eye? You can RSVP for the event, as well as get a link to create an entry in your calendar and more, at the Meetup event page.

Note that you can also certainly just show up on the day at the Connect room.

Finally, again, there will be a 6pm (EDT) talk as well, Mike Henke on "Leveraging Eclipse for ColdFusion Development". For more on these, and all CF Meetups, see my blog category of CFMeetup announcements about them.

Hope to see some of you Thursday at noon.

PS Speaking of CFML development via Eclipse, I'll have yet another announcement about something that may interest many, separately.

For more content like this from Charlie Arehart:

• Signup to get his blog posts by email:
• Follow his blog RSS feed
• View the rest of his blog posts
• View his blog posts on the Adobe CF portal

Need more help with problems?

• If you may prefer direct help, rather than digging around here/elsewhere or via comments, he can help via his online consulting services
• See that page for more on how he can help a) over the web, safely and securely, b) usually very quickly, c) teaching you along the way, and d) with satisfaction guaranteed