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.

New ColdFusion TechNote : Problems downloading and installing ColdFusion MX 7

People may remember the firestorm when we first released CFMX7 to the web as users with (from what we could tell) a 28K modem line that traveled through northern Siberia before getting to their ISP tried almost 5 times to download the release and it was corrupted - why couldn't we get them the bits? Suggestions to wait for a CD didn't go over too well.

The ColdFusion support team is very proactive in trying to stop customers from calling them :-). They noticed that we still have a large number of support calls were coming in where the user was unable to get a clean download of the (350MB!) coldfusion install.

To try and address these problems, the have published a new tech note:
Problems downloading and installing ColdFusion MX 7.

Hopefully this will help customers upgrade to ColdFusion MX 7!

Which English do you want?

Talking with Ray today about some Verity things, I was sharing some tidbits about the english locale and performance that I realized should be published more widely.

First, some history. The Verity 5.5 version in CFMX7 is very different that the verity 2.5 version we shipped in CF5/6/6.1. In particular we (and verity) defaulted to the "english" locale. Since then, Verity has acquired the linguistiX technology, which is the company that used to provide their international locales, but I believe they have since bought the company and/or technology and now they default to using "englishx". Where the "x" stands for linguistiX.

But ColdFusion MX 7 still defaults to english. Why? Two reasons.
1. To ensure compatibility with previous CF releases. Users expect to get the same results from indexing and searching when they upgrade to CFMX7.
2. Performance. The englishx locale is "better". According to Verity it is much better than the old english locale. Better means better search results. In order to get these results, it takes more time in the indexing of the data. Since we were trying to maintain indexing performance, we used the english locale as it means indexing will be faster.

Bottom line: If you want better search results, and indexing performance is not critical, create your collections using English (advanced) in the CF administrator or "englishx" when using the cfcollection tag.

Axis 1.2.1 released

In the better late than never category, Apache Axis 1.2.1 was released last week. With the loooong time between 1.1 and 1.2, we are trying to get back to the 'release early, release often' philosophy that is one of the strength of open source.

Update: This version of Axis by the way will be included in the ColdFuison MX 7 updater. "Comming soon".

See you at CFUnited

As a reminder, I will see you at the CFUnited conference next week. Tons of great sessions, including mine on advanced Event Gateways.

Looking for help with CFCHART?

Prayank, one of the ColdFusion developers, has created a great blog to help answer questions about the features and fixes for cfchart in CodFusion MX 7.Check it out. Charting can get very complex, and he does a great job of showing how to solve various problems you may run in to with CFMX 7 charting.

Speaking at CF United

I am going to be speaking at the CF United (http://www.cfunited.com/) conference at the end of June in Washington DC. This is the conference that used to be called "CFUN" and it is turning in to the largest ColdFusion-only conference in the US.

I will be giving a (new!) Advanced Event Gateway talk, detailing lots more of the 'how it works' information that people have asked for and also going in to more detail on how to write a Java Event Gateway. I tried to keep the required Java knowledge to a minimum, but this is an advanced session...

Here is my session blurb: http://www.cfunited.com/topics#193

I was going to do the (old) Event Gateway session that I have at MAX last year, but that has been turned in to both an article and will soon be published as a Breeze "Macrochat" on DevNet on Monday May 2, 2005. So I was forced to write some new stuff, which should be interesting to the event gateway fans out there (you know who you are).

CF United should be a great time, a good chunk of the team is going, everyone is presenting, and the turnout looks to be almost as good as when Allaire did its ColdFusion DevCons years ago. The CF team has always been a bit disappointed with how MAX doesn't emphasize CF enough, since we feel it has the CF DevCon as its roots, so we are very excited to focus lots of attention on this conference as a platinum sponsor.

See you there!