That as to be most exciting blog title ever. If you are still reading this, I congratulate you. While checking my email on my phone yesterday, I took note of how GMail will shorted labels in the top level display. Instead of using the full label, which wouldn't fit, they include part of the left side of the string and part of the right side of the string. So for example, a label, "Important Stuff / From People Who Think They Are Important" would be shorted to something like, "Important Stuff...They Are Important." Most of the time the shortening is very understandable.

(Sorry for the somewhat simple blog posts this week - all day offsite with Adobe. I promise to return to my normal incredibly exciting posts soon...)

Monitoring ColdFusion with FusionReactor

February 22, 2012

If your CF server starts acting up, how do you go about resolving problems? If you're on ColdFusion 8 or 9 Enterprise, you may know that you have a built-in ColdFusion Server Monitor. Did you know there is an alternative tool that supplements it well? FusionReactor is a commercial third-party tool, which can monitor not only any version of CF (6, 7, 8 or 9, whether Standard or Enterprise) but also Livecycle and any other Java web application or server in your environment. (www.fusion-reactor.com)

Such monitoring is about more than "watching a screen". You can arrange to receive email alerts with valuable information (sort of a black box recording before a crash), and FusionReactor also creates really valuable logs that can also help with post-mortem analysis. They can also assist with deciding on CF server configuration settings, watch trends for hardware upgrades, and more. And as of FusionReactor 4, these logs now track information that previous only the CF Server Monitor displayed (but didn't log at all). Finally, an additional tool, FusionAnalytics, can help analyze and visualize that data over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and so on.

In this 50-minute session, veteran CF troubleshooter and independent consultant Charlie Arehart will introduce and demonstrate these and other key features of FusionReactor (including stack tracing and crash protection), and will end with a brief demo of FusionAnaytics (www.fusion-analytics.com)

Register Now: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=1965964&loc=en_us

Intergral, makers of FusionReactor and FusionAnalytics, have a pretty cool offer for folks buying or upgrading ColdFusion:

Intergral and Adobe Inc. are running the following promotion up to Feb 29 2012. If you purchase either a new or upgrade license to ColdFusion 9 Enterprise, you will receive FusionReactor Enterprise Server Monitor 1 Year Subscription (RRP $399), absolutely free. If you purchase a new license of ColdFusion 9 Standard, you will receive a copy of FusionReactor Standard 1 Year Subscription (RRP $249). All software must be purchased via Intergral http://www.fusion-reactor.com/adobe to be eligible for this offer. Our prices for CF are very competitive, making it all a very good deal.

If you purchase Platinum Support with your new ColdFusion license, then you are entitled to receive all upgrades and updates to ColdFusion in the next 12 months following your purchase - read more http://www.adobe.com/support/programs/customer/platinum_solutions_brief.pdf

Just passing it along... (btw reader - I never did want to be a 'job poster' for the CF community sinc eothers do- but I've done a couple recently. A few because they were for my last job, and one for Adobe. Do folks mind these? Find them helpful?)

Web Application Developer

Just passing it on...

Job Opening for Sr. ColdFusion Developer in CA/ San Fernando Valley Position:

• Senior ColdFusion Developer
• Contract to hire.
• Seeking an advanced-level developer who lives to push ColdFusion and Object-Oriented Web development to the edge.

Job Description

• Sr. Web Developer / Architect to drive the direction of the company's technology solutions, define and implement best practices and build lean, powerful and extensible functionality.
• Work closely with Business/Systems Analysts, Database Administrators, and Stakeholders to architect, design, and implement robust and user friendly insurance business applications.

More info at his blog post: Job Opening for Sr. ColdFusion Developer in CA/ San Fernando Valley

Yesterday I posted an example of highlight/fadeout effects done with jQuery. It wasn't necessarily that exciting, but it's not something I've done before so it was fun to build. Fellow evangelist (and my boss, so yeah, his comments get special attention) Kevin Hoyt commented that what I had achieved would be possible with CSS and transitions.

Yesterday I blogged a simple example of how to turn an RSS feed into a tag cloud. Today reader JP commented that it would be cool if I could mimic an effect he saw in a Flash based tag cloud. Basically, as you mouse over each word, they light up. Here's what I came up with.

Earlier today Mike Henke asked if there was a way to generate a tag cloud from an RSS feed. While he was able to find a solution quick enough (Wordle), I thought it would be kind of fun to try this myself. I knew that Pete Freitag had already blogged on tag clouds and ColdFusion, so all I had to do was generate my word data and pass it to his code. Here's what I came up with.

As a gentle reminder, don't forget the excellent resource that is the Adobe Cookbook, including over 200 ColdFusion Cookbook entries. Looks like it has been a while since content was added, so take this as a gentle push to yall to consider adding something.

RIACon 2012 will be held August 6th and 7th in beautiful Rockville, MD at The Legacy Hotel and Conference Centre. The official call for speakers will begin next week, but for more information, check out the web site: http://www.riacon.com. I missed last year but hope to speak at this years conference!