An Architect's View

I'm posting this as a reminder to myself since I've had to do this twice in the last few weeks and have to Google it each time... To install TrueType Fonts on Linux so that Java can access them ought to be as simple as copying them to $JAVA_HOME/lib/fonts/ but it isn't. You (also) have to go through the following process to make them valid system fonts: Installing fonts on Linux I don't think the xfs restart is needed (since both of the servers I've installed fonts on lately have not had xfs running in the first place). This process was required to make the fonts visible to the Alagad Image Component (which is now free open source!). Your mileage may vary of course.

TechCrunch ran a story yesterday about MFG.com's site overhaul. The new site uses Java and took three years for their team to complete, during which time the team felt "hand-cuffed" and the "great ideas" the company had couldn't be executed. To me, that whole story sounds like an expensive failure. Of course, the fact that it was a ColdFusion to Java transition has drawn a lot of comments from the CF community but most of those comments focus on the CF side of things and the suspicion that MFG.com didn't do its research (I personally suspect they got hooked in by an "enterprise" consulting group who started them down the Java tracks). Whilst we can all sing the praises of CFML and criticize MFG.com for many things, I think we all need to look at the business aspects of a three year project to relaunch a web site in this fast-paced world. Yes, I'm sure it was a massive project and involved a lot of integration work but even so, macromedia.com was completely rebuilt from the ground up in less than that - and Macromedia's complete ERP replacement project (with 38 integration points!) was also completed in substantially less than three years...

In the absence of a printable schedule - sorry, Joe Rinehart says it's a problem with the Media3 hosting and he's been trying to get them to fix it for months! - here is my schedule for cf.Objective() 2009:

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Update: The Java 6 class loader bug mentioned in this post was fixed in Update 10. I just upgraded a 64-bit Red Hat Linux server to Java 6 Update 11 and changed the jvm.config file to specify the new JDK's jre directory for java.home. After restarting the server, it was able to serve up the first page of a complex Model-Glue / ColdSpring / Transfer application in just a few seconds. With the default JDK installed by ColdFusion 8 (1.6.0_04), it took between 30 and 60 seconds to serve that first page. I have updated this blog post accordingly. Thanx to Charlie Arehart for prodding me earlier today on this issue.

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Some people have been noticing dramatically slower application startup times on ColdFusion 8 compared to ColdFusion MX 7. I've seen a lot of complaints about shared hosting systems where applications timeout. Since CF8 is so much faster than CFMX7, you might wonder why application startup times can be so much worse.

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I'm already used to the magic that is Transfer and I can't imagine building a ColdFusion application without it. Adobe have said they're looking at integrating Hibernate into "Centaur" and showed some simple examples of how it might work in their keynote at CFUNITED (I expect we'll see more at MAX - you are going to MAX, right?). Hibernate is the de facto standard ORM for the Java world and it is very robust, scalable and feature-rich. We've been using Hibernate for a while to manage the persistence of our business objects and that has driven us toward Groovy for those business objects since, right now, you cannot use Hibernate with ColdFusion Components in any meaningful way and we didn't want to write all the verbose code that Java would require. A recent discussion on the Transfer mailing list has focused on how to model one-to-one relationships and why Transfer doesn't support them directly. This is one area in which Hibernate's features go far beyond what Transfer offers - and part of the reason for us to "switch" to Hibernate for future product development. Another modeling quandary when it comes to persistence is how to handle inheritance.

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Since I have a fairly large body of very smart readers, I figured I could ask you a question and have you help me for a change :) I have a bunch of data in a database encrypted via ColdFusion and I need to figure out the exact Java equivalent so that I can encrypt / decrypt across application boundaries. The ColdFusion code uses encrypt() / decrypt() with DESEDE and a hex encoding. I know the key value (duh!) but I can't figure out the exact same Java equivalent code. Anyone know?

Vince Bonfanti hosted a Birds of a Feather session this evening where he officially unveiled the Open BlueDragon project.

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The latest software update for Mac OS X 10.5.2 adds Java 1.6.0_05 but does not change your default setup. See this tech note for more details. I haven't yet switched to Java 6 as my default JRE but I will shortly. Happy to hear any early feedback from folks.

If you use Mark Mandel's awesome Transfer ORM in a cluster, you've probably wondered what to do about keeping the cache in sync across servers in the cluster. I've had to solve this problem a couple of times now and I figured I should publish an example of how to do this.

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Andrew Powell - Enterprise Class MVC with ColdFusion and Java - Saturday 11:25am We hear a lot of talk about using individual Java objects within ColdFusion but the reality of enterprise development is that entire subsystems tend to built entirely in Java. Software teams that serve the enterprise often build large, complex systems using Spring and Hibernate. How do you go about using ColdFusion with such systems? I haven't seen any presentations on this subject so I was pleasantly surprised when I started reviewing Andrew Powell's slide deck to find that he was focusing on how ColdFusion can provide the web front end to enterprise class Java systems. He introduces Spring (the Java version) with a demo and then introduces Hibernate (the industry standard ORM for Java), again with a demo. After that, he will walk you through solutions to the problem of connecting ColdFusion on the front end to Spring on the backend and, using Mach-II as an example, he then shows how to create an MVC web application that allows you to leverage the entire Spring-powered, Hibernate-persisted Java backend. If you work along a Java team - or you are considering using more Java for your backend systems - this talk will provide you with a lot of good information about how well ColdFusion plays in this space.