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!

Contribute CS4 does blogs

I recently had to re-image my laptop (note to self: make sure disk de-fragmentation software is known to work with exactly the version of disk encryption software you have installed on your system), so I had to re-install all of the software that I think I need to do my day-to-day. For me this includes development stuff like IntelliJ IDEA, Perforce, Eclipse, FlexBuilder, ColdFusion, TortoiseSVN, etc, etc.

Eventually I want to actually edit some HTML for some reason, so I need to get a copy of Dreamweaver.  Plus Homesite+ 'cause I am still old-school when I need to edit CFML.  I have a secret stash of Homesite+ (we haven't sold it as a product in quite a while), but I like to stay current on Dreamweaver cause they be adding in some good stuff that I'll probably never use, but I like to know that I have it.  So I went looking for the CS4 - Web Premium installer.

I found it and after installing the 4 Gigabytes worth of software, I had my Dreamweaver CS4 along with ~10 other programs that all look really neat and that I will never use in my day job of writing Java server code.  But again, its nice to know that I have it and hey there are some perks to working at Adobe, like being able to install $10,000 worth of software you probably wont use on your Adobe laptop (did I mention the disk encryption software?).

To make a long story longer, one of the included programs was Contribute CS4.  I love Contribute and in fact have written lots of ColdFusion specifications using it (now we write specs in a Wiki, which is the spawn of the devil, but I think that is the topic for another post).  By this point, it should come to no surprise to those who have read the title of this entry that I am typing this very blog post in Contribute.  And I must say it's really nice.  It integrated with Blogger quickly with just the entry of my user name and password.  The editor grabs the look and feel of my pages and does a real nice job of showing me how the final post will look.  There are IE and Firefox plug-ins that give me one button access to create a new post.  All-in-all it is a very nice interface and the Contribute team has done a great job with this release.

So I lied, maybe I will use some of the other software included in CS4.  Now if I could just figure out how to use Photoshop....

Happy New Year

Happy New Year. I realized I haven't posted anything for quite a while. I have been heads down working on the next version of LiveCycle Data Services, which of course I can't talk about. :-) So here is wishing you and yours a happy, healthy 2009.