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How to solve failing "api" URLs, in CF2016 and 11 (not a problem in CF2018)

Note: This blog post is from 2020. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 trying to run a request against CF 2016 (or perhaps 11), and the URL you're using has a path which starts with /api, you may find that the request fails to run (it may give a blank page). What gives? (It was related to the CF2016 API Manager, not CF's REST services feature.)

And what can you do about it, if you are on CF2016 or 11, and you want to use /api for your URLs? There are are two choices, depending on your needs: in brief, you can either:

  • change your /api folder to a new name (which I realize may not appeal to all to some)
  • or change the CF configuration, to STOP it treating /api specially for the API Manager's use. You would do this by editing two CF config files, urlworkermap.properties and web.xml (but this will break the ability of the API Manager to introspect REST services in CF2016 or CF11, though not CF2018)

TLDR; if you're bold and a risk taker, you can jump to the bottom to see my list of changes to make for that second option. As is often the case, there is risk in making changes in a cavalier fashion. There are various things to consider, and I warn of them below--but the good news is that this is a change that may take only minutes to do, once you've been careful to read about how to do it effectively.

Read on for more, including pros and cons of each choice, what to change and where, why this problem NO LONGER happens from CF2018 onward, and more.

(And if you are not familiar with the CF Enterprise API Manager, which is installed separately from CF, you can read about it here.)

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Configuring FusionReactor to show "real ip address" when behind a load balancer or other proxy

Note: This blog post is from 2019. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 your server is behind a load balancer or other sort of proxy, you may have noticed that when you view information about requests in FusionReactor, they all have the same (or nearly the same) IP address. This can be easily fixed, and I show you how in this post.

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New Oracle JVM update released, July 16 2019

Note: This blog post is from 2019. 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.
Just a heads-up for folks using CF, Lucee, and other Java-based apps and app servers: Oracle has released today a new JVM update, for Java 8 and 11. It's update 221 for Java 8 (1.8.0_221), and update 4 for Java 11 (11.0.4).

For some, that's all they need to know. For most, they will probably want to read on.

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My 4-part webinar series, "Troubleshooting with FusionReactor", starts Jan 30

Note: This blog post is from 2019. 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.
Tomorrow (Jan 30, 2019) I am beginning a planned 4-part series of new FusionReactor webinars (to add to the 13 topics I've already done, as listed at the FusionReactor Webinars page).

Update: (The sessions were recorded and I've modified this post to offer links to the recordings instead of the registration pages.)

These all-new ones will focus on Troubleshooting with FusionReactor and are geared toward helping folks new to FR--or perhaps experienced but a bit bemused by its many features--to better understand how to use it to troubleshoot problems in your app server (CF, Lucee, or any Java server).

The parts in the new series (with links here to view the recordings) will be:

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What's new in FusionReactor 7.3 - over a dozen useful new features and enhancements

Note: This blog post is from 2018. 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.
FusionReactor (my favorite server monitor) continues its onward march of refinement and improvement with its latest release which came out last week, 7.3. In this post, I highlight over a dozen of its new features and improvements.

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Having issues with the popup calendar feature in CF11 or 2016? There's a fix

Note: This blog post is from 2017. 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 using the cfinput type="datefield" feature to popup a calendar and are finding that it's a) not working *at all* in ColdFusion 2016 or b) it showing up but not *correctly* after ColdFusion 11 update 12 or ColdFusion 2016 update 4, there's a fix for both.

The first problem was introduced in the CF2016 installer released in Dec 2016, and any after that, where Adobe has literally removed the library used for the calendaring, but you can add it back, as I discuss below. (If you install or installed CF 2016 from the original installer in Feb 2016, you won't see this problem as it wasn't removed then.)

The second problem was introduced in those two named updates, and was fixed in the very next updates (CF11 update 13 or CF2016 update 5). And of course, this could also happen if you're moving to CF11 or 2016 for the first time, and someone else had "fully updated" those to that update level before you started testing against it.

If you'd like to know more, read on.

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VisualVM failing to find plugins/updates? Solving the 503 error with an updated URL

Note: This blog post is from 2017. 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.
Have you tried to update or simply see the available plugins for VisualVM (the Java monitoring tool built into the JDK), and found that it fails to respond right away (the progress bar will show "checking") and then it reports:

Unable to connect to the Java VisualVM Plugins Center because of Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.oracle.com/splash/java.net/maintenance/index.html

There is a solution.

TLDR: the quick answer is to change the URL used by the tool (Tools>Plugins>Settings) to use a new URL, such as https://visualvm.github.io/uc/8u131/updates.xml.gz.


For those who'd appreciate more detail, read on.

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Recordings for nearly a dozen recent FusionReactor webinars I've done

Note: This blog post is from 2017. 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.
I've been doing a series of one-hour webinars about FusionReactor over the past several months. They've covered nearly a dozen different topics (all with live demos), with more to come, including one just last week, "Making the Most of FusionReactor's Logs".

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The 100 most interesting posts on the Adobe ColdFusion blog, the past 3 years

Note: This blog post is from 2017. 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.
The Adobe ColdFusion team blog often has really some interesting content, but I find that some people are either not aware of the blog or just don't keep up on it, or perhaps they have trouble finding something they saw before or maybe heard was there.

So here I present what I feel are the 100 (technically, 105) most interesting/useful posts made there over the past 3 years (2014-16), offering information about CF and CFML which should be valuable to readers for years to come.

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2016 in review: top 10 CArehart ColdFusion posts of the year

Note: This blog post is from 2017. 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.
I thought it may be useful to gather up a categorized listing of my most (seemingly) helpful/resourceful blog posts of the past year, to help others be aware of them (and indeed to help me be reminded).

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