Speed up Verity DB indexing

I recently made a change that will be in the ColdFusion MX 7 updater that seems to give use a pretty nice improvement in the speed of indexing custom data using cfindex. I was trying to resolve a bug where records in our bug database that had XML in the description of the bug were not getting indexed.

Turns out that we were applying the "universal" filter to the content that we were indexing. This meant that Verity would examine the content (or the first few K) to see if it could ID the document type. This takes time and in our case was doing the wrong thing as it would see free form text with the XML declaration in it, pass it off the to XML parser, which would choke and the record would not get indexed. You can see this result by using the new STATUS attribute to assign the indexing status to a variable and dumping that after indexing.

Anyway, here is the fix. Find the file verity/Data/stylesets/ColdFusionK2/style.dft and comment out the /filter = universal line as follows:

  field: CF_BODY
# VDK will attempt to autorecognize BODY content if we use this
#    /filter="universal"

You can either recreate your collections after making this change, or you can shut down the CFMX Search Service and edit the style.dft file directly in your collections that you use to index custom data.

Enjoy!

Take a tour of the Newton R&D office

Damon has posted a cool photo tour of our offices here at Macromedia in Newton.

ColdFusion Turns 10!

So we celebrated ColdFusion's 10th birthday yesterday here at the Newton office and around the world at 20 or so user group celebrations. It is hard to believe that I have been involved with CF for 8+ or those 10 years. Well, I took a 18 months break to go work on JRun 4 and Apache Axis with Glen Daniels, but around here I am the 'old timer' as I am the only engineering team member still around from the early days (before CF 3.0). See the timeline right around when the Simpsons surpassed the FlintStones.

By the way, I think it is brilliant that the event that I call "The Great Space Removal" is listed on the timeline too (November 1998). Running through all the code and changing the name of the product from Cold Fusion to ColdFusion sure was fun!

It was great seeing JJ Allaire, Jeremy Allaire and a whole bunch of other guys (yes they were all guys) including Charles Teague (Allaire employee #1), Simeon Simeonov, and others. These were the people I had spent so much time working with, changing the face of the web.

utf-7 character set support for cfmail and cfpop

Check out Paul Hastings blog entry about how to adding utf-7 support to the ColdFusion mail tags. Using Java with ColdFusion is a wonderful thing, it lets you the user take advantage of stuff like this in the open source community.

ColdFusion MX does have printed documentation!

Recently at the CFUnited conference several users expressed surprise that ColdFusion has printed documentation. Since we don't include it in the box, and apparently we don't even include a card that says where you can go to order it, there are those who think that Ben Forta's books are the only thing available.

This is most definitely not the case! Since CF 5, the ColdFusion documentation has been updated and rewritten quite a bit. The current documentation is really very good. Certainly if you need to read up on Event Gateways or ColdFusion components, those chapters will take you from 0 to 60 in no time.

So, you you need to have a printed book by your side (like I do) whenever you are coding, you can order the complete CF doc set from Macromedia at cost ($150). Start at the documentation page or go direct to the US online store.

Of course the entire content is available online at LiveDocs.

Change to my feed URL

According to the blogger front page, I can now include images in my posts. Blogger just keeps adding cool new stuff, but yet still doesn't support RSS (which I think you can get for a fee). Huh. Anyway, I am running my feed through FeedBurner now at the following URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TomJordahlsMusings. FeedBurner gather some interesting stats (like how many people are reading my blog) so if you can switch your reader to point to this feed, that would be great.

Update: Apparently I can't add an image - doesn't seem to work today, oh well.

Another Gateway and IM article

Here is another article from WebMonkey on how to use IM and the Event Gateway in CFMX 7: Rule Your Site with Instant Messaging. It was written by Robert Capili.

It is very similar to the one on the Developers Center I logged earlier today. Check it out.

Still more proof

I have been telling everyone that the Event Gateways we ship in ColdFusion MX 7 are great. Here is more proof on the Macromedia Developer Center: Chatting Through IM Gateways in ColdFusion MX 7 written by Matt Woodward. He writes a detailed description on how you can use Instant Messaging and the new Admin API to remotely manage your ColdFusion server! Sweet.