Though it doesn't say anything new, its good to see sites like O'Reilly's onJava.com talking about products like Flex. Despite sales success general support for Flex from Java heavyweights IBM seems to have been slippling.
The underlying Java libraries that CFHTTP leverages caches DNS lookups indefinitely. For the 350 or so feeds aggregated by Fullasagoog this is like a handful of sand in the budgie smugglers. But it looks like we might have a fix.
We've been building and setting up a few large CFMX applications of late. When it comes down to optimising and tuning the CFMX set up there's always plenty of debate. I thought it would be interesting to get folks feed back on Maximum JVM heap size.
Flex is not so much about rapid Flash development (although this is one of the advantages) as it is about collaborative Flash development. Flash IDE, the FLA, and everything about it is the bane of largescale development -- it sucks. This is why Flex had to be built.
CFC's and custom tags are a great subsitute for "true" OO. If you consider that the vast majority of web development simply does not benefit from the differential between CFC's pseudo-OO and Java's true OO support, it seems perfectly resonable to me to build something entirely in a pattern devised using CFCs.
Joe Cheng pointed out in the comments of "Java jock Jihad", "there is just not a lot of common ground for CF and Java developers to stand on". Aaron Johnson has similar things to say, "Why should they care?". Maybe they're right.
I'm amazed how often I see a total lack of understanding within Java circles of how CFMX fits. ColdFusion remains the only answer to making Java accessible to a mass of non comp-sci web developers who play a deceptively important role in the evolution of the internet. Not to mention the joy that comes from the productivity CFMX offers.
With CFHTTP in such a sorrowful state in early CFMX I thought I'd hunt around for a java based alternative. I stumbled across HTTPClient and used it for a while importing feeds into Fullasagoog. I was stoked to find that Macromedia have used HTTPClient to replace the old shot-in-the-head CFHTTP libraries.
Finished up some training on CFMX administration a few weeks ago. It struck me that there is very little in the way of admin information for CFMX bar a few technotes -- so I put together a humble little Breeze presentation to run folks through server settings and their nuances.
Paul Hastings, Team Macromedian and locales guru, has set up a new little blog on globalising CFMX; cfg11n. Funnily enough, G11N=globalization (11 letters between "g" & "n").
Running CFMX with JRE version 1.4.1 seems to produce the wrong date/time for Aussies even though the windows time and locale may be set correctly (using getLocal() produces expected result).
If CFMX seems to be chewing on your memory you might put out the garbage to clean things up. The Java runtime accepts several flags that allow you to modify the behaviour of the underlying garbage collector.
Where in the world? Paul Hastings has taken another crack at determining where a user's coming from based on javainetlocator...
