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The "Internet is written in ink".  This is one of the great lines in "The Social Network", a movie I highly recommend.  As someone said at the Golden Globes, Arron Sorkin made people typing at computers look exciting.  In the spirit of that, I realize that going months between posting on a blog is a sure fire way to ensure no one will read your blog when you DO have something to say, and that the Tom Jordahl "internet brand" will not be maintained at its high level.  :-)

My excuse this time, as it has been before, is I have been heads down making the software.  This time the next major release of LiveCycle Data Services, what we will probably call version 4.5.  Why 4.5 when the last version was 3.1?  Well, because we like confusing folks but mostly because we want to align our version number with Flex in the same way that we align the BlazeDS version numbers already.  So before we had Flex 4/BlazeDS 4.0/ LCDS 3.1.  Some time this year all the numbers will be the same.  So that will be less confusing we hope.

We have some good stuff coming this year, we will continue to build on the Fiber Data Model development paradigm which makes is super simple and fast to define your data model and deploy it to LCDS to get Data Management functionality using Hibernate/JPA persistence without writing any code.  We are expanding the Java and ActionScript code we generate from the data model to give you more control and customization abilities in your applications.  We are expanding the client options to include Java, HTML5 and various mobile platforms.  We have some amazing integration with SAP services.  And I have been working on some real nice enhancements to Flash Remoting to make it simpler to develop applications that use the various features of Data Management without having to change from the RPC-style of thinking.

I hope to be able to post more about these great new features in 2011.

Speaking at RIA Unleashed Boston - Nov 11-12, 2010

I have been scheduled to talk at RIA Unleashed this year in Boston.  I will be talking about (and showing some demos) the upcoming LCDS-Next release support for non-Flash clients, including HTML5, Android and iOS.  We have some really exciting stuff coming up in this area.  You can read my session description here.  For those attending, I will be in the 11:15am slot on Friday.

As a plug for RIA Unleashed, I have attended and spoken here before and it is a really great conference. It is just the right size for really getting an opportunity to engage with your peers who are working on client or server side of Rich Internet Applications.  If you are in the Boston area, I highly recommend it.

Model Driven Code Generation post from Matt Butler

Matt Butler has posted some good model driven code generation information on his brand new blog. See the post here.  LCDS 3.1 has the ability to generate JPA annotated JavaBeans as well, and if I don't find the time to post about it, perhaps he will!

ColdFusion Survey

The ColdFusion team is looking for feedback on ColdFusion 9 and your wish list for the next major release. They have put a survey up at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ColdFusionServer.

Now is your chance to influence what goes in to the next version!

Blog spam and MAX 2010

I am getting tired of deleting spam comments on the previous blog entry, so I thought I would add a new one just for variety. I wonder why the particular spammer is able to get around the Google captcha that is required to post, but every week or two they post to the last entry in my blog.

In other news, It has been confirmed that I will be speaking at MAX 2010. The tentative plan is for me to run a BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) session on the new Offline features in LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 for Flex and AIR. I have never done a BYOL, just a hands-on lab session, so this is going to be a "learning experience". This is a really a neat and powerful feature, so I hope folks will come away with a good idea of how they can use this feature in AIR apps that can go offline.

See you there!

Duplicate session errors

Alex Glosband, one of our lead QA engineers on the LiveCycle Data Services team, has posted a very helpful and informative description on why certain Flex applications might get the error:

Detected duplicate HTTP-based FlexSessions, generally due to the remote host disabling session cookies. Session cookies must be enabled to manage the client connection correctly.

Check out the full discussion on his blog: http://www.alexglosband.com/?p=3

Photoshop 20th Anniversary Film "Startup Memories"

This is worth the 18 minutes to watch:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/photoshop-20th-anniversary/startup-memories/

In this 18-minute documentary, produced by the Adobe TV and Adobe Content Strategy & Service teams, John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances that came together at just the right time spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.

One thing that stood out for me was near the end when one of the creators talked about hearing from people who said "Because of PhotoShop, I have a career". This is one of the most important reasons why I spent over 10 years of my profession life working on ColdFusion - the fact that what I helped create had thousands of users who made their living using it. That what I did for my job made a major impact on others. There really isn't anything more that a software developer can ask for. At least this software developer.

LCDS 3.0 has hit the streets

LiveCycle Data Services ES2 version 3 is now available.

Download the free developer edition.

LiveCycle Data Services documentation is available online:

* Using LiveCycle Data Services HTML | PDF
* Application Modeling Technology Reference HTML | PDF
* ActionScript Language Reference HTML
* Installing LiveCycle Data Services HTML
* Javadoc HTML
* Release Notes HTML
* Quick Starts HTML

Model Driven Delopment

Wow, its been three months since my last posting. I wish I could say that I have been using twitter to express all my thoughts to the web, but I don't use twitter so that wont work. :-)

Anyway, we are on the cusp of releasing LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3.0 which has some really exciting improvements in how you can create Flex applications that use the LCDS Data Management functionality. I could wax poetic for a few hundred words, or you could watch Christophe Coenraets excellant MAX 2009 session on model driven development. He really shows off why this is such a giant leap forward in productivity and usability.

Dean Harmon and I did a very successful (I think, and the evaluations seem to agree) hands-on session about this same topic, but the hands-on sessions were not recorded.

You can get the "almost final" LCDS 3.0 bits on Adobe Labs right now and give this stuff a try.

LiveCycle Data Services 3.0 Beta videos

We have just published a set of videos (9 so far) that show off some of the new features in the LCDS 3 beta that has been available up on Adobe Labs for the past few weeks.

Of particular note is one that I recorded on how you can extend the new Fiber Assembler to customize the server side management of your data.

Check all the videos out here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/

LiveCycle Data Service 3.0 Beta available

We launched LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 public beta yesterday on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/.

We have beefed up tooling and simplified developing flex application development. You can now develop new fully functional flex applications with no server code in under 10 minutes. We have a few videos to help people get started http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/, and plan to add more (I am on the hook for one or two).

Now is the chance for folks to try out the new Data Model development features we have added and give us some feedback.

ColdFusion 8 Performance Tuning

Check out this new Dev Center article written by Kunal Saini - Performance tuning for ColdFusion applications. Lots of good information on VM tuning, Administrator settings and CFML code writing.

Brendan Meutzner on LCDS and CF

I recently had an email exchange with Brendan Meutzner about a problem he was trying to solve when using an integrated ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services system. He wanted some way to use dynamic data sources in his LCDS assembler CFC. He blogged about his problem and the solution here.

Make ColdFusion 8 work with Apache CXF

"Alan" left a comment on one of my older posts ("ColdFusion 8 Getting Started code available") detailing how to get ColdFusion 8 to work with Apache CXF. I figured it would be useful to repost in its own entry.

DISCLAIMER: I have not tried this, nor do I make any guarantees that this wont do bad stuff to your server. Try it on a Developer Edition on your desk before messing with any production server.

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If anyone is interested, I have been able to make ColdFusion 8 work with Apache CXF, which supports a variety of web service standards and libraries - SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, REST, etc.

Caveats: CF8 works with CXF in the sense that CXF objects can be instantiated as Java objects in CFML and their operations successfully invoked. It does NOT work as a native CF web service call using or CreateObject("webservice", "..."). Also, this technique requires some low-level changes to the default CF8 installation, so it is not for the faint of heart.

In general, the procedure is to grab the CXF libraries and get CF to recognize them. You can drop them directly into a /lib folder that's in the CF classpath, or if you want to be a bit more cautious you can point the CF classpath to the folder that contains the CXF JAR files.

Detailed steps:

1. Download the latest CXF distribution and extract/install it somewhere. If your CXF root is /foo, then find /foo/lib. You'll see a bunch of JAR files, and your mission is to get CF to recognize these files and load the classes in them.


2. Stop the CF server.


3. CF8 and the JRE that comes with it use an older, incompatible version of the JAXB library, so we need to get the newer one in place. Create /foo/lib/endorsed and copy the jaxb-api-version.jar file into that folder.


4. Find jvm.config in your CF installation and open it in a text editor. Append the following to the JVM arguments: -Djava.endorsed.dirs=path_to_foo/lib/endorsed -Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs=javax.net.ssl. Find the string -Dcoldfusion.classPath= in the JVM arguments and place the path to /foo/lib immediately after the equals sign (i.e., at the FRONT of the classpath), with a comma to separate it from the rest of the classpath entries. Do not set the classpath using the CF administrator. It will not permit adding elements to the front of the classpath, and will in fact overwrite the classpath if it is used to change Java settings at any future point.


5. A suspected bug in the CF classloader causes the wrong part of the CF architecture to load the SAAJ classes. [Tom Here: This isn't a bug, CF maintains absolute control over which classes it loads via its own classloader. A better workaround would be to edit the jrun.properties file in the WEB-INF/lib/cfmx_bootstrap.jar file and change the exceptions list] Get around this by copying /foo/lib/saaj-api-version.jar into {java.home}/lib of your CF installation. Then delete or rename saaj-api-version.jar in /foo/lib so it does not get loaded from that location. Also delete or rename saaj.jar from the main CF library location (ColdFusion8\lib on a Windows installation, standalone configuration).


6. Disable the native JAXB library in ColdFusion by deleting or renaming jaxb-impl.jar in the main CF library location.


7. Restart the CF server.
   

With these steps, you will be able to invoke Java objects that serve as clients for the web service endpoints. These Java objects need to be created, compiled, and installed to a location in the CF classpath in order to be invoked. The CXF documentation describes ways to create the Java objects; wsdl2java might be your best bet. You can have it create classes that are SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 compatible, allowing you to call those services via the Java objects from inside ColdFusion files.

After doing this, I did a cursory test of the native CF web service functionality (Axis 1.1) and it seems to work still, so existing code shouldn't be affected.

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There ya go, I would be interested in posting an update if Alan or someone else figures out what the classloading issues with the SAAJ libraries are.
Thanks Alan!