An Architect's View

This weekend has seen a complete migration of An Architect's View from a very old version of BlogCFC (3.5.2) with a custom Fusebox 4.1 skin to the latest Mango Blog (1.4.3) as well as a complete migration of all of the content of the non-blog portion of corfield.org (my personal stuff, my C++ stuff and a bunch of stuff about CFML, Fusebox and Mach-II) from Fusebox to FW/1. I've moved from a VPS on HostMySite to an "enterprise cloud server" at EdgeWebHosting and I think it's all gone pretty smoothly although it's been a lot of work.

Hopefully I haven't broken too many URLs - I spent quite a bit of time working on Apache RewriteRules to try to make sure old URLs still work - but it has given me the opportunity to streamline a lot of the files on the site (can you imagine how much cruft can build up in eight years of running a site?).

What's left? Just the "recommended reading" bookstore portion of my old site. I store the book details in an XML file and process them in a CFC as part of the old Fusebox app (converted from Mach-II before that and from PHP before that). It's late and I can't face it tonight. Then I need to build out a Mango skin that looks like my old site (and eventually re-skin the non-blog portion of the site).

The underpinnings of the site are Apache, Railo (3.1.2.010 at the time of writing), Tomcat (6.0.26 at the time of writing), Red Hat Linux, MySQL. I still have some fine-tuning to do but this is pretty much an out-of-the-box WAR-based install of Railo on Tomcat for this one site on the server. Over time I'll probably build out a home for FW/1 here under another domain, with examples and more documentation than is currently maintained on the RIAForge wiki. That's the plan anyway.

If you find any broken links, let me know (the Contact Me! link is in the right hand column, near the bottom).

If you're seeing this entry, you're looking my new server at EdgeWebHosting, running Mango Blog 1.4.3 and the rest of the site is powered by FW/1. I'm still wiring things up and restoring content and design (which is why this looks so different!). Do not adjust your browser, everything will be back to normal soon.

Recently quite a few people have been asking me whether the DevWebPro site is "scraping" my blog or somehow stealing my content. Clearly we're all very touchy about this subject (in light of the outrageous behavior of a certain nameless publishing company)! So I want to reassure everyone that I have an agreement with DevWebPro that they can republish any of my blog posts that they find interesting - they only publish a fraction of what I write. Here's my author archive with selected blog post re-prints. As you'll notice (I hope) the "comments" link at the bottom of each post on their site links directly to my blog so any comments are always on my blog, not their site (yes, I know they have their own comments tab too). They choose which blog entries to syndicate, they choose the categories, they choose the title, I get links back to my site on every entry.

Just a heads up that I plan to republish a number of my ArgumentCollection blog posts here as Broadchoice plan to reuse the domain name for an upcoming support / corporate blog to accompany their new support documentation wiki and support forums. That means your RSS feed may show a number of articles that you have already read on their original dates. I will republish each article using the original date but I can't guarantee they won't show up new for you :)

As you might imagine at this point in my Railo for Dummies series, I'm ready to try it on a real website such as my own. I've been running corfield.org on CFMX7 Standard Edition for a long, long time and never upgraded to CF8. Trying to run corfield.org on Railo has been on my 'todo' list for a long time as well and now seemed like as good a time as any. Here's how it went...

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Here comes The ArgumentCollection! That's the Broadchoice engineering team blog we've been hinting at over the last few days. If you subscribe to ColdFusionBloggers, you'll already be getting the new feed. We'll try to get it on AXNA shortly. So what does it mean for me, Joe, Brian, Ray and Nico in terms of our personal blogs? Well, posts that relate specifically to what we're doing at Broadchoice will appear on The ArgumentCollection and posts that are more general - or more personal - will continue to appear on our own blogs. We may also post additional commentary on our own blogs, referring to a core technical post on The ArgumentCollection. We're hoping that the Broadchoice engineering team blog becomes a valuable source of technical information for folks building complex, large-scale systems with ColdFusion, Flex and other complementary technologies. We're also hoping that you all continue to read our own blogs too of course!

Someone who commented several times on one of my blog entries has been bombarding me with email because I criticized them in comments on that entry and then refused to approve any more of their comments. Now they're demanding that I delete all their comments from my blog and they're starting to threaten me. What would you do if you received an email like this?

The impossibility you imply does not exist. I didn't request that you delete my comments from the public record; I requested that you delete them from your blog. Running a blog comes with some responsibility. Read up on authorship on the World Wide Web. It is my right to demand that you no longer carry my comments on your blog. You have given more than enough reason to justify my decision. Oh, and you make a mistake in assuming I'm going to be waiting a long time. I'm giving you the opportunity to do the right thing. Of course, you may continue to ignore it if you want. Then you will learn the hard way.

Here's the blog entry in question that started the exchange with this person.

Some people were not very excited about Apple's keynote yesterday but the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone is plenty enough for me, along with Google's updated mobile apps. I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps? Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement! So now my iPhone has:

• 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock - with 10 cities
• Maps
• Notes
• Stocks
• Weather

Followed by:

• Google Docs
• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Belfry Scientific Calculator
• My client's Google Docs
• My client's Google Mail
• ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
• IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!

Then my menu bar is:

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

On screen two, I have a row of games:

• Bejeweled
• Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
• InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
• Mahjong

Then my multimedia tools:

• Camera
• iTunes
• iPod
• Photos
• Text
• YouTube

And, yes, they are in alphabetical groups. Call me anal retentive and see if I care! Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!

As I did in 2006, here's my review of 2007. For some strange reason, I decided to make some New Year Resolutions in 2006. How did I do? I said I'd do more unit testing - and I did, but there's always room for more unit testing. I said I'd do more open source. Well, I released Fusebox 5.1 and Fusebox 5.5 as well as my Scripting project and a cfcUnit facade for CFEclipse so I think I did alright there. I also said I'd do more Flex and write some Apollo (now AIR) applications. I didn't do so well on those two! I think I'll revert to my usual practice of not making resolutions this year...

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It's almost that time of the year where we tend to take stock of the last twelve months and make resolutions for the coming twelve months. I've never been much for making resolutions but I always provide a review of the last year, based on my blog postings, so expect my review of 2007 within the next week or so. Whilst not a resolution, I will be embarking on a series of blog postings in the new year that are longer and more in-depth than my regular posts. They will cover a lot of the architectural advice that I find myself giving many of my clients and I will also be covering frameworks in more detail based on requests I've been getting via email over the last year. I'll also be looking at some anti-patterns that I've been seeing in code that I've reviewed over the last eight months (without identifying anyone, of course!). I hope it will help other avoid these problems in their own code. I hope folks will find it interesting reading!