Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Here's a blog entry from another site on a topic that I think some of you may enjoy very much:

"Don't miss out on the many powers of the Google Toolbar (some hidden buttons, some new context menu options, and more)"

http://www.tipicalcharlie.com/google_toolbar_1.htm (Update: tipicalcharlie domain is no more, but page recovered using Archive.org.)

Now, if you look closely at the URL, you'll see it's got my name in it. :-) And indeed, it's mine. I started the blog long before this one and in it I share all manner of tips related to computing (not CF-specifically).

I'm always torn about whether to post some topics here or there. I try not to cross-post much at all (and not even to blogs of other folks) unless it's something that I think you might really appreciate and otherwise miss. Such is the case here.

If you like the stuff there (see the categories, as there may be past entries you'd not want to miss), be sure to signup to receive new entries by email (as you can do here), or add it to your RSS reader of course. Not everyone uses them yet. Indeed, see the entry I did there on how to get notification by email of new entries from any blogger who may not offer their own email subscription feature.

(Update: Sadly, squeet (a tool to send RSS feeds by email) is no more. But there are other alternatives, that I track in a category of my CF411 site: http://www.cf411.com/rss_email.)

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Exactly one month after releasing Spry 1.2, the Adobe Spry team has responded to user feedback and also slipped in some new features in a new 1.3 preview release.

As part of my ongoing series on Spry, here's my take on what's new. The primary new feature set is "Spry Effects, for introducing animations and color effects to your pages." While it may sound like just eye candy, there are some useful things. More on that below.

There is also an interesting new 2-selects related demo (more below) and various new features to existing things, like new methods to manipulate the accordion, fixes to various aspects of the Ajax (SpryData.js) functionality, as well as support for new setup/finish callbacks for the effects. See the site/docs for more on those. Here, I want to highlight the 2-selects related demo and a brief discussion of the effects.

Nifty 2-selects related demo

One thing that's easily missed (not highlighted anywhere) which may appeal especially to CF developers is a new 2-selects-related demo, though they call it a "master detail" demo instead. It shows how to make 2 selects relates data between 2 datasets. The code is remarkably easy, as explained in the one paragraph there and shown in the few lines of code which you can see doing a "view source" there. Again, this is the beauty of Spry: those few lines of code in the browser are indeed all that you need to write, and all that the browser needs to execute.

For those new to Spry, note that the data can come from any file of XML data or template that generates it, as requested in a line of Javascript (the only javascript code you need to write on the page):

I'll also remind those new to Spry to check out all the entries in this series on Spry, as well as my Spry Compendium of resources to help get you started.

The new effect library

The Spry Effects are the following:

• Appear/Fade Makes an element appear or fade away
• Highlight Flashes a color as the background of an element
• BlindUp/BlindDown Simulates a window blind, up or down, where the contents of the affected elements stay in place
• SlideUp/SlideDown Simulates a window blind, where the contents of the affected element scroll accordingly
• Grow/Shrink Increases/reduces the size of the element
• Shake Moves the element slightly to the left, then to the right, repeatedly
• Squish Reduces the element to its top-left corner and disappears

Some will find more value in various aspects than others. Let's keep in mind that the focus for Spry is on non-technical HTML developers, to ease access to not just Ajax-style development but also the DHTML-based (CSS, Javascript, and HTML) visual components that often go along with those. A key point is that these changes in screen appearance happen without a browser refresh. An interesting point they make is the following:

As with previously-released Spry datasets and their accompanying widgets, we designed Spry effects to be easy to implement on the page while letting the framework do the real work. No new tags or strange syntaxes are required. Designers with a rudimentary understanding of JavaScript can easily implement any of these effects. More advanced users can combine base effects to create more complex and sophisticated effects.

The following shows an example of a basic effect :

onClick="Spry.Effect.AppearFade('target',{duration: 1000,from: 0,to: 100, toggle: true;});"

You can apply an effect to almost any page element, and the code is easy to understand and edit. With the trio of Spry framework features--datasets, widgets, and effects--Adobe hopes to provide designers and developers the tools they need to easily create Ajax-enabled pages.

Why Is Adobe Re-inventing the wheel on effects? Why not just use an existing library?

Sure, there are other libraries that do more, but at least Adobe is working to add more and more. In fact, some may wonder why they are bothering to create their own when there are those other packages. They now specifically address the question of why they don't just integrate with some existing library, like Scriptaculous, and instead are using them as a model while keeping focused on their own vision.

All that said, I could even see CFML folks taking ready advantage of things like the blind, shrink/grow, slide, and squish, such as to add online help on a page that appears and disappears. Again, sure, if you know how to do CSS and/or javascript yourself, you can do it yourself.

I must admit that when shown on this combo page, I'm left wondering how the slide and blind differ from each other (and even the accordion). :-) If you view the demo that works with images instead, the difference becomes more apparent.

The effects are enabled in a new .js file (SpryEffects.js), but beyond that and 3 others it's still quite a light-weight framework.

Other Comments

Note that they indicate in the readme that they've removed the docs from the download, and they are available now only online. Still, it seems most of it has just moved to an articles directory, and there are of course still the reamdme, changelog, and other HTML files in the download.

Finally, they do clarify (frequently) that this is pre-release software, so jump on board and be a part of making it happen--but have patience that things will change as they learn and evolve the product.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

If you try to use the Flex Builder CF Wizard, you may get tripped up by trying to deploy the resulting SWF (with its communication back to the CF Server) on a remote box (where that CF Server would live). It's easy enough to do, but it may fail to work, if you're not careful about how you configure things while running the wizard, to indicate that remote server URL. It was causing quite a bit of consternation for some, and finally Ken Reiss has observed the solution and blogged about it:

http://www.kenreiss.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/8/10/Flex-20-with-CFMX-702--SUCCESS

I just think this is something that others may trip over in the future and not find readily, so I want to point it out to those that I can.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

Folks often ask me whether I know if BlueDragon can run either of the two performance analysis tools, SeeFusion and FusionReactor. The answer is a qualified "yes". They will run (currently) on the J2EE edition of BlueDragon, but not the standalone editons, BlueDragon Server and Server JX.

Both SeeFusion and FusionReactor are based on an underlying java-based mechanism called Servlet filters. On the surface, it might seem that things should work since the standalone versions of BD are built atop ServletExec (just as CFMX standard and enterprise standalone editions are built atop JRun).

Sadly, the edition of ServletExec that New Atlanta chose to bundle under BD (a choice made a few years ago) does not support servlet filters. ServletExec itself has indeed supported servlet filters for a few years; it's just that New Atlanta never had any motivation to update the version that was underlying BlueDragon. Who knows if that may change in the upcoming BD 7.

The good news is that it seems you can indeed use both SeeFusion and FR with BD/J2EE. I've previously done the former, and my reading of the FR docs for now suggest it would work fine. The installer guide for FR has a section on "manually installing FR", and where it discusses the directories to be updated for working with Tomcat and Jboss, it's really the same info that would apply to BlueDragon deployed on those servers (or any like them). (I've tried it tonight and hit a snag, and the guys from FR are working with me to get through it. I'll update with a comment here whatever I find.)

Finally, of course, BD.NET doesn't support servlet filters at all, so you can't use SeeFusion or FusionReactor on that product.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

If you're looking for yet another avenue of introduction to Flex and its intergration with CF, particularly a free one-hour Breeze session, check out the recording of BEn's presentation from a couple weeks ago:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=list&type=ondemand_seminar&loc=en_us

On that page, select ColdFusion or Flex from the product list on the right, and on the resulting page, don't be thrown off by the title, "Government: Building Rich Internet Applications". It's of value to all viewers.

As Ben is wont to do, he avoids being powerpoint-centric and jumps right into some generic Flex demos first, and then 20 minutes into it starts to really talk about Flex/CF integration. There's about 5 minutes of discussion after that and then he jumps into code-centric demos, showing the CF-related integration in some flex code and in the Flex Builder, including the wizard. By about 45 minutes he instead starts coding Flex/CF integration manually within the builder, which some may find compelling. There is Q&A throughout (which as always in Breezo's is a bit of a struggle, torn between answering questions and staying on topic) and a lot of Q & A at the end, which many may especially enjoy.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

Following onto my 2 previous entries related to updating JDBC drivers in CFMX 6 and 7, some readers may appreciate a little more help on the matter of determining just what version of the drivers they do now have installed.

This news has been shared in various blog entries over the past couple of years. I'd like to reprise them here for your edification. (Note that while they may show how to look at some particular driver, like SQL Server, you can--and would need--to change what they show to look at whichever driver you are interested in. More on that below.):

• Pete Freitag showed some CFML code that gives you the answer on screen
• Brandon Purcell showed a CFML approach that writes its output instead to the CF log files instead (see below for more)
• Steven Erat did a post that is a take-off on Brandon's approach. He too writes his result to the logs, but he shows code naming several different driver class names and showing their versions (at least as they were known then, in 2005). That list of classnames may still be useful in later years. See below. [Indeed, as an update, in 2008, Dan Switzer did another take on that hard-coded listing of driver names, and comments in 2013 showed it working for CF10 then.]
• Finally, Sarge showed how to get the info via the command line (again, see below for more on this, and see also my last comment in the comments section below the post, for a related tip on running that java command)

So a couple more thoughts on all this.

And about the last two options above

First, in the case of the second two options above, note two things:

• Those last two links are versions of each page as recovered using the good 'ol internet archive/wayback machine. For more on the value of this wonderful tool, see my post on that.
• Note that those last two links make reference to files or folders under C:\CFusionMX\ or C:\CFusionMX7\ folders, reflecting the time they were written. For those on CF10 and above, you would look now instead under [yourcf]\cfusion\, or if using instances, [yourcf]\[yourinstance]\.

Finding the version of the driver YOU are using

Second, I said above that you would need to use the name of the driver you really mean to look at, which may be different than what their example show. For instance, Pete's code shows looking at the SQL Server driver, macromedia.jdbc.sqlserver.SQLServerDriver. So what if you're using the Adobe-provided Oracle driver? Or any other?

Well, some good news if you use an "other" driver type (where you choose that in the CF Admin DSN page), then you must provide the driver classname yourself. That would be the name to use.

But what if you one of the several other kinds of drivers listed on that page? CF doesn't show you the classnames it uses for that. (And I could not find it in several places I looked. More below.)

But again see Steven Erat's code above that listed several of the class names known at the time (and which still seem fairly accurate more recently).

And while there are still other places that clever readers may want to point out that may hold them, I could not find them in these places:

• The DSN classname is not listed in the CF Admin page where you add/edit a DSN
• The DSN classname is not not listed in the CF Admin "settings summary" page, even though that does offer useful additional info, like the underlying jdbc URL that CF builds, when using its built-in DB drivers
• They classname is also not listed in the XML within the neo-datasources.xml or neo-drivers.xml files, if you know about them. There ARE classnames there, but you will see that if you look, for instance, at the SQLServer one, it does show a classname (in the "class" xml element). But it's just macromedia.jdbc.MacromediaDriver, not the macromedia.jdbc.sqlserver.SQLServerDriver used in the examples above.
• They're also not listed in the "system information" page in the CF admin--the "i" icon in the top right--which shows the "CF Server Java Class Path". That does not list the class names for the Adobe-provided DB drivers, because they are instead all embedded in one jar, called macromedia_drivers.jar. Really determined folks may know you can unzip that and dig around and determine class names and paths, but I won't elaborate that here.

So it seems that for the built-in CF-provided drivers, you're best off just using the variations offered in those examples above (especially Steven's).

Hope all that help others as much as they have me over the years.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

Did you know there's a nifty Chart Designer built into CFMX 7? While Webcharts has sat under CFMX's charting since 6.0, this designer tool is newly available in CF7 only, as the webcharts.bat file in the cfusionmx7/charting subdirectory. It allows you to create still more useful and attractive charts than are built into CFCHART, and then you can leverage them using CFCHART. For those who've followed CF7 closely, this is old news, but for those who are still getting up to speed in CF7, it may be quite newsworthy.

I'd like to point you below to a few references to learn more. First, here's a screenshot of what the tool looks like:

And here are some of the resources to help guide you, from blog entries to articles to the docs to podcasts. I'd also like to thank Dale Fraser of the CFAussie mailing list whose note today first clued me into this stuff. Enjoy:

• Steve Brownlee's: Customizing Your CFCHART Results, from 12/05, which shows how to use the designer tool and how to connect to data in your app using CFCHART
• Chris Wiggington's "ColdFusion Tip: Using the included webcharts3d engine in CFMX 7", from 11/05. He focuses on calling it using Java and building the XML for the chart
• Tim Buntel's CFDJ article, "Not Your Father's Charting" by Tim Buntel in CFDJ
• The CFMX 7 docs on CFCHART and leveraging this feature
• The ColdFusion Weekly Podcast of April 3
• Apologies to anyone else who had a useful controbution on this subject. Let me know in a comment and I'll add you here.

Note as well that there is a pdf in that charting directory, a 35 page Designer User's Guide. And pay special attention to the available options in the designer under file>setup, in particular the 2 tabs, designer and server.

There is a more complete (125 page) WebChart Developer's Guide.

Finally, some other useful CF charting tips are available in a blog that was devoted to the subject, http://cfchart.blogspot.com/ . Though he only made entries June and July 2005, it's worth a look.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

In my last entry, I mentioned briefly the new "JDBC Spy" feature that's available in the new 3.5 JDBC drivers for CFMX. I want to point out some more info for those interested in investigating the Spy feature further.

First, notice that there is a site at the DataDirect site (from whom Adobe purchases the JDBC drivers):

http://media.datadirect.com/download/docs/jdbc/alljdbc/reference/spy.html

It discusses some additional attributes. And still more useful info is offered at another page on their site:

http://media.datadirect.com/download/docs/jdbc/alljdbc/reference/diagnostics2.html

This actually shows what the log of info would look like, if you want to decide first if its info is worth the bother setting up.

This other page also talks about ways to turn the spy logging on and off at runtime, using Java method calls. Perhaps someone with more familiarity with the underlying Java classes for these drivers can translate the code there into something we can use in CFML. (It's late, and I don't have the energy.)

As such, be aware that the spy feature could generate a lot of data, so you may want to consider creating two datasource for each DB you may want to monitor. Either rename them to enable whichever you want to be in effect, or change if your code lets you specify a DSN via a variable, you can change the value to the "spying" version when you need it.

I did test and determined that also you can just add/remove the connection string from the end of the JDBC URL (see the technote for more), and immediately the logging stopped against the datasource. As a trick, I stuck the connectionstring value into the "description" field of the datasource definition, to keep it readily accessible if I wanted to add it back. (See my previous entry for a warning about putting it into the ConnectionString field instead.)

Finally, I should clarify that this Spy feature is not to be confused with the much older (and more powerful) p6Spy project, which has gone from open source to commercial to kind of stagnant. It still has great use, and in fact has a useful related SQL Profiler that's worth looking at. Still more at http://www.p6spy.com/, and maybe I'll write more about it later.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

Had you noticed the JDBC updater at http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=42dcb10a? It applies updates to both the Merant DataDirect and Sequelink (ODBC) drivers.

I have a few questions/observations for others who have run it or may consider it, and they apply to 7.02 and 6.1 users, such as whether you need to apply it manually and about the various new features it adds, like integrated NT authentication for SQL Server, and a new JDBC Spy feature for any DBMS? More on them in a moment.

Do you need to update this for 7.02? 6.1?

First, do you need to apply the update manually if you're running 7.02, or even one of the later cumulative hotfixes (CHFs)? It doesn't say specifically. While it may seem we should presume it was included in 7.02, I think we should not. Some features it adds (below) are not in the C:\CFusionMX7\lib\macromedia_drivers.jar (whose date is also from 2004, at least on my 7.02 install.)

(UPDATE: In fact, it appears that the updated drivers were NOT in fact included in 7.02, or any CHF. First, as mentioned in the comments below a discussion on the Adobe Forums confirmed that these drivers were NOT included in 7.02. Also, note that CHF 1 for 7.02 lists the link for the driver updates as something you need to do yourself, under "additional information". There's also no mention of the JDBC drivers in the technotes for 7.02 CHF's 2 or 3, so it seems safe to conclude that 7.02 users do need to apply the update individually to get the updated JDBC drivers.

But better still, if you have 7.02 installed and wonder what version you have, you can find out for yourself. Check out this later entry of mine which helps you determine what version of the DB drivers you are indeed now running.)

As for 6.1, it's not clear but do we need to apply it if we have the latest 6.1 updater (6,1,0,83762 )? Again that build's macromedia_drivers.jar also lacks some of the files added by this updater, so I would assume so. I applied the update to my CFMX 6.1 updater release including also the important updating of the Sequelink ODBC Server as indicated in the technote. Don't miss that, if you're running on 6.1 (not needed on 7). After restarting, things are working.

Warning for those with 6.1 and 5 installed

I should note that I did find that my CF5 server (also running on this same dev box) suddenly, and for the first time ever since this box was created a few months ago, started raging with a persistent 55% cpu utilization for ntconsolejava.exe. I certainly would have assumed that the problem was in my CFMX 6.1 services, but by process of elimination it was the stopping of "ColdFusion Management Repository Server" (from CF5) that did the trick. That runs a JRun instance in the CF5 server.

I can't see how this would be connected, but I point it out in case it happens to others. I don't know what to do about it. I may just stop my CF5 server until I ever need it. I suppose I could also just set the management service to manual. I don't recall what the mgt service did in CF5. A quick review of the docs shows it had to do with archiving and admin reporting.

New Features in the Update Driver

But perhaps more important, as for the features it adds, did anyone notice the "sql server nt authentication" it enables? It seems that would solve a useful problem, but I could not get it to work. I followed all the steps including extracting the DLL (it's in the zip) and creating an "other" datasource type with the provided "authenticationmethod" in the JDBC URL. Has it worked for anyone?

Note also the interesting new spy feature, which can provide some useful diagnostics (think SQL Profiler, but for any DB and all the info tracked in a log file on the CF server). I was able to get it working successfully with a SQL Server database (using the "other datasource type" as explained in the technote), but when I tried to add it to an odbc dsn against an Access DB, using the connection string approach listed, nothing happened (no spy log created, until I used the "other datasource approach).

Note as well that the updates offer various fixes for SQL Server, Oracle, and Informix. It's also an update that pure JRun 4 users can/should run. I will point out that one blogger has found a change in behavior regarding multiple statements on a single SQL line: http://www.feed-squirrel.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/6/8/CREATE-TABLE-from-CF-7.

See the technote (linked at the top here) to learn more. I've also opened a question in the Adobe forums with this same info: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=143&threadid=1180864&enterthread=y, as I can't assume as many people read my blog as will read that.

I'll be curious to hear (here or there) what others have experienced and what they think of these new features.

I should warn that the technote indicates a couple of times that you should not try to put these new connection string values into the "connection string" field of a DSN, instead creating an "other" datasource type and providing them on the JDBC URL for that DSN. When I made the mistake, I found that I could not query any ODBC datasources nor could I even start the CFMX Admin or get debugging on any page. All complained that the "DataSource service is not available.". I found no neo-query.bak to recover from, so was quite stuck. A careful analysis of the new-query file found that inappropriate CRLF character codes had made their way into the file (As 0a and 0d values that made for bad xml). I removed them (not trivial to do correctly) to get things back in order, so FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. 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.

In case folks have missed it, and as I alluded to in a previous post, a couple of folks are doing us all a nice service and putting together a nice update of the week's news in the CFML community.

First is Andy Allan's weekly summary of top news from the blogs, and you can find the latest each week at:

http://www.creative-restraint.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/Blog-Round-Up

Second is Ryan Hartwich's summary of the top news (blogs or not). For now, there is no place listing all his posts of that sort, but the latest is here:

http://www.fusionauthority.com/News/4642-Adobe-ColdFusion-News-Brief-August-8-2006.htm

Finally, there are also the podcasts (and their sites) that I mentioned in my earlier blog entry. I won't point these out each month, but I do want to bump up their visibility. These guys are all doing us a great service. Thanks.