I have to apologize. For a while now this server has had issues. Sometimes I have to restart the services every morning. Sometimes it runs fine for days. My host, Edge Web, are very proactive and helpful, I know this because I'll get multiple phone calls, emails, etc as they try to repair my server. This bugs me because I am costing them time for something I should be able to correct myself. They give me a good deal as I help promote ColdFusion and provide open source and community resources, but at the end of the day, I don't want to be a burden to them as I'm not really paying my fair share there.
The issues I have on my box are something involving Apache or ColdFusion. If I could spend a day just hacking away at it I could possibly figure it out. I have spent time digging into it (and as I said, so have Edge Web), but at the end of the day, I do not want to be a server administrator. I don't want to have to worry about tuning. I want this site to continue to be a resource for folks who want to learn. If that means ditching all my dependancies, then so be it.
Right now I'm considering moving to static. I can't move to S3 because they don't support regex URL replacements. I could easily use one regex rewrite rule to go from /index.cfm/2014/3/12/Reprint-What-in-the-heck-is-JSONP-and-why-would-you-use-it to /2014/3/12/Reprint-What-in-the-heck-is-JSONP-and-why-would-you-use-it, but that isn't supported with S3 hosting. The other big issue is comments. Disqus allows for importing, but I currently have 50000+ comments here. I'd have to be careful to not miss anything. Everything is lagniappe. I'm more than willing to push search to a custom Google search engine. Any ColdFusion demos would fail, but I typically post my code in downloadable format as well.
During the time I wrote this post - I had to restart Apache multiple times - so heck - it may not be related to ColdFusion (or MySQL) at all. That being said - I don't care. I want to simplify as much as possible so I can focus on having this site up 100% of the time.
Archived Comments
I can't say that I like this news. I realize you're not a ColdFusion evangelist at Adobe per se but it sends a bad message to the ColdFusion developer community. "If Ray doesn't run CF anymore, why should I?" I don't know if I'd care as much except that you wrote BlogCFC, which is still the de facto standard for blogs in ColdFusion and as a matter of principle, if I were in your shoes, I'd run BlogCFC until CF no longer existed. I realize that you shouldn't be obligated to stay on CF if it doesn't suit your site anymore, and I'm not in your shoes, but I'm just saying. That's just me.
More importantly: thanks for the Louisiana language lesson. First time I ever heard that word!
@Brian: I'd still run CF on this server. I've got about 5 other sites using CF here and they would continue to do so. My concern is about *this* property, which is my biggest "face" to the outside world.
@Andy: What word?
"lagniappe", I reckon.
I had to look it up...
--
Adam
Ah. Heh, well, I'm slowly becoming a native I guess. Although I'll always be considered a yankee. ;)
What you said earlier was: "Any ColdFusion demos would fail, but I typically post my code in downloadable format as well." That suggested you were abandoning ColdFusion on the server. Did I misunderstand?
As far as what I said earlier, I still feel the same way largely because of BlogCFC. I can't imagine many people would use it anymore if its author isn't. It seems a more reasonable thing to try to track down the issue before giving up entirely.
Also, hypothetically, let's say that you did stop using BlogCFC on here: Wouldn't links to your blog entries go 404 as a result? I would think that would do more harm to your traffic than some site instability. You'd be better off keeping the blog online that way for existing blog entries and figure out some other alternative for new blog entries if you're going to go ahead with it.
I'd kill it for raymondcamden.com, so yes, they woudn't work there. It just means no more live demos - which I'm fine with anyway. I have run into issues with old demos throwing errors anyway.
As for BlogCFC... Brian... I think you missed something big: http://www.raymondcamden.co...
"Wouldn't links to your blog entries go 404 as a result? "
See my comments about URL rewrites. It would be trivial to correct for old entries.
I just checked - I *do* have entries in the past that didn't have the nice URL. But they are *so* old, I'm ok if they loose "Google juice" a bit.
I missed the URL rewrite comment, or at least I missed it in my last reply, but that makes sense.
I should have mentioned that I was aware that you had handed off BlogCFC to Scott some time ago. Wow, that long ago, huh? Time flies. Now if only that project was going somewhere! :-) There's still no BlogCFC 6 available for public download on GitHub, even in a unfinished/broken state. That's something to poke Scott on, though, not you.
When I moved from BlogCFC to Amazon I wrote out two files for each blog entry:
1. An html page with nothing but a meta redirect
2. The actual blog entry at the new friendly URL.
That got around the lack of regex forwarding.
For comments I wrote them all out for each entry with no ability to add comments to old entries (which is fine by me).
If you want the scratch code I wrote for this let me know.
Is it a Windows box with CF10 and Apache? There seems to be a nasty connector bug in CF10's mod_jk that basically crashes Apache when it can't reuse connections, no amount of running seems to fix it as it looks like a memory leak. I've seen it happen on 2 Windows + Apache servers, only problem is I can't replicate it in a non-production environment so it's very hard to provide a test case for. (And yes, the connectors were removed and rerun after installing updates). But if that's not your environment then just ignore me :)
P.S. The Blog CFC comments to Disqus migration is very easy, I moved mine about 6 months ago. Let me know if you need some code :)
Auto-correct fail, "no amount of running" should be "no amount of tuning" ;)
Im just a bit worried the way Adobe is taking CF. I love the pricing structure of the Adobe CC. But when you can't open CFM or CFC files in Dreamweaver it starts making you wonder. Yes of course they want you to purchase an extra $300 product (CF Builder) to natively edit their several thousand dollar web app. Or take the time and screw around with the preferences in DW to fix this. It makes you wonder..me and several other I know at least.
And yes I know this is just a *bit* off topic here but it's been bugging me all day.
...ok, bitching mode over...
@Aeros: You know you can use CFB for free, right?
@Justin: Yeah, Windows + Apache.
Thats the stripped down version right? I forgot about that part so thanks for the reminder. But I still find it a bit funky that Adobe's primary IDE doesn't work natively with out of the digital box with Adobe's only web application server.
I recently started working for an employer who has been around for decades and has been using CF since version 4 or 5. They are now looking to get off of CF and moving to PHP or .net because of the lack of CF developers out there. I've actually heard this from a couple of companies in one form or another during my recent job search in the past 3 months. It just makes a CF developer wonder what I should start looking at next. I have some PHP experience but .net pays quite a bit more.
I am curious as to peoples thought on the future of CF. I know you work for Adobe but you always seem to speak your mind. I would really like to hear other peoples thoughts on this matter. Or maybe this might be better for a separate blog entry.
Thanks Ray
@Aeros: It is missing a few features, but I wouldn't call it stripped down.
To me - at the end of the day - DW has it's place - and CFB has it's place. I don't necessarily see any benefit in Adobe putting effort into making DW better for CF devs when there is already effort in another editor specifically tuned to CF. That's my opinion, not company policy.
As for the future of CF - we've got a public beta of the next version already out there. That's commitment at least for the immediate future I'd say. (And the new CFB is pretty nice I think.)
I understand your thought here. Our company just has a bunch of adobe CC licenses which doesnt have CFB. But with some workaround you can get DW to work. They just dont want to have to pay another $300 for another editor..thats all.
Ill take a look at the new CF. I used to do that all the time when I wrote books for the earlier versions of CF. I seriously do hope that CF will be around for a long time.
Thanks for the feedback Ray.
Micah...
I agree with Brian and I'm sure many other readers who find this unsettling. If Ray Camden can't get CF stable with his own blog Im not sure where that leaves the rest of us.
Ray, it sounds like the mod_jk connector bug then, perhaps you could check the connector logs to confirm? It might be something that the CF engineering team should see for themselves. I'm not sure how many other people have run into this issue, but when it happens it seems like the only solution is to use IIS instead of Apache... Have you got time to work through the issue fully and/or get the engineering team involved, because I think this is something that may need a connector hotfix :S
Unfortunately I'm on the road in a location with poor wifi. They even throttle you if you do anything high speed, like RDP I assume.
I did't have that problem with the connectors in Apache or IIS with any version of CF (8, 9, 10). I'm going to test installing the CF11 in apache to see if it works.
As an aside, I was *kinda* wrong about S3 not supporting regex rewrites. They don't, but, you can do a match though. So right now my URLs are
/index.cfm/yyyy/mmm/ddd/slug
With S3 I can match /index.cfm/ and replace it with /.
I've also got 3 years of entries using
?mode=byentry&entryid=X
and in theory I can replace that with
/entry/x