For example, lets say you need the second particular element in an XML document. You might fetch some XML with cffeed and then use XMLSearch() to get all the matching elements. Then reference the second element of the resulting array, like this:

<cffeed source = "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=90210" xmlVar= "myXML">

<cfset Forecasts =
     xmlSearch(myXML,"//*[local-name()='forecast' and namespace-uri()='http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0']")>

<cfset theForecastIwant = Forecasts[2]>

In CF9 you can take a little shortcut, like you can in many other languages:

<cffeed source = "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=90210" xmlVar= "myXML">

<cfset theForecastIwant =
     xmlSearch(myXML,
     "//*[local-name()='forecast' and namespace-uri()='http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0']")[2]>

Nice! This probably happened when the team added the anonymous variables feature.

And if you are wondering, this works fine in Railo 3.1 but not in OpenBD 1.1.

I blogged about this issue in 2007. I was trying to add a column to an existing array that I knew only had one row. QueryAddColumn() accepts an array of values to add to an existing query – one element for each row. So I only needed an array with one element. So I thought I could use CF8’s new inline array syntax and just pass it in like this:

<cfset QueryAddColumn(existingQuery,
                     "newColName",
                     "varchar",
                     ["single new value"])>

This would throw an error in CF8, but works just fine in CF9!

By the way this also works just fine in the current version of Railo.

There are a few caveats:

1. You must be using Tomcat as your J2EE server (I think you can probably do this with JRun if you are using the J2EE/multi-server version of ColdFusion, but I have only done it using Tomcat)
2. You must run your code from a subdirectory. That is, if your local test site is setup like http://localhost:8080/openbd, you will run your code from http://localhost:8080/openbd/<a subdirectory>/

I’m not going to go through setting up Tomcat or Railo/OpenBD/AdobeCF, see this great blog post by Matt Woodward if you need help with that.

Once everything is setup, you should have three separate webroots, probably something like:
C:\Tomcat6\webapps\railo
C:\Tomcat6\webapps\openbd
C:\Tomcat6\webapps\cfusion

Now create a subdirectory in one of those directories, lets just take the first one, railo. Call the new subdirectory “shared”. Now comes the trick, we will use a junction to make subdirectories named “shared” in openbd and cfusion, but really they just point to the shared directory under railo. This “junction” is a feature of the NTFS file system and works much like a symbolic link on Linux.

If you are running Vista, Windows7, or Windows 2008 you already have a built in tool to create a junction called “mklink”. Otherwise if you are running WindowsXP or Windows2000/2003 you need to download Junction v1.05 from Microsoft’s site. Its a sysinternals tool, if you aren’t familiar with that group, they made lots of great techy tools for Windows. You can get it from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx.

Download the zip file and extract the single .exe file that is inside it. This is a command line tool so I placed it into my C:\windows\system32 directory so it would be in my path and can be run from any command prompt. Now open up a DOS command prompt, and change into your railo webroot. Then create the two junctions named “shared” that point back to the real “shared” directory.

Now we have this folder structure, where “shared” is really the same folder in each location.

Just drop your files into there and then you can hit them using the three separate URLs you used when setting up Tomcat. I use railo.dev, openbd.dev, and cfusion.dev as my hostnames.

If you are on an OS that has the mklink command, the syntax is a little different.

Note how on Windows7 the DIR command is smart enough to recognize that the folder is actually a junction and shows me where it is linked to.

The folder looks a little different in Windows Explorer, too. Unfortunately it looks just like a shortcut, which it certainly is not, but at least you can tell its not a regular folder.

I have this setup on both of my main development machines, and find it very convenient to be able to run my exact same code through all 3 CFML engines just by changing the URL. I usually keep three browser windows open as I develop so I can easily test stuff on all 3.

This was my error message in OpenBD:


What immediately catches my eye is “Line 13 Column 2″ of Application.cfc. So I open that file and see:

As you can see, line 13 is just the opening cffunction tag. I don’t see anything wrong with it, nor anything wrong with the lines around it. So I went back to the error message and scanned for some other files and line numbers. I see that the error message highlighted line 26 in red. Line 26 creates a component from my UserService.cfc file. That line looks ok to me. I also see in the “Detail” section of the error message it says Problem occurred while parsing: followed by several lines of code. Glancing through the code shown I don’t see anything obviously wrong, and I’m not given a line number either.

So I flipped over to Railo to see if that would give me a more useful error message. Here is the output from Railo:

“Syntax Error, Invalid Construct”. Hmmm that isn’t much more helpful. But I do get a different file/line number this time, line 107 of UserService.cfc. Look carefully at that code and you might spot the error, but it just wasn’t registering for me. So I decided to try the code in Adobe ColdFusion8:

Aha! The same line number is referenced, and ColdFusion even gives us the column number and the character at that column that is causing the problem. Looking near the @ sign in that line, the obvious problem is I have a # in that string. # has special meaning in CFML and must be escaped.

I’ve been very impressed with what Railo and OpenBD have brought to the table, but here is one area where they need some work. Had I saw the error in Adobe CF first I would have found my error in seconds. Looking back at the openBD error message now that I know what the problem was, I can see that it is showing me the offending code. But it gets lost in all the other misinformation – pointing out files & line numbers that had me looking in the wrong direction. And no where did it ever mention line 107 of UserService.cfc.

Railo did much better, showing me the exact line with the problem, but not quite as good as Adobe CF8.

If you didn’t know, Railo has a separate Server administrator and one or more Web Administrators. This means Railo is ideally suited for CFML hosting since you get your very own administrator where you can setup datasources, mappings, etc.

The site is http://alurium.com

The Founder is Peter Amiri, here is his blog http://blog.amiri.net and on twitter: @peteramiri

Peter told me that you don’t need a credit card for the free trial, either.

7 :
8 : <body>
9 :
10: <cfset wx = CreateObject("webservice","http://www.webservicex.net/WeatherForecast.asmx?WSDL")>
11: <cfdump var="#wx#">

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: sun/tools/javac/Main
	at com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.xml.ws.dynws.WSDL2Java.compileOutput(Unknown Source)
	at com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.xml.ws.dynws.DynamicWebServiceStubGenerator.buildClientClasses(Unknown Source)
	at com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.xml.ws.dynws.DynamicWebServiceStubGenerator.generateStub(Unknown Source)
	at com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.xml.ws.dynws.DynamicWebServiceInvoker.getStub(Unknown Source)
	at com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.tag.cfINVOKE.prepareWSObjectData(Unknown Source)
	[snipped]
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: sun.tools.javac.Main
	at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1360)
	at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1206)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:320)
	... 37 more

This happened when deployed on Tomcat on JDK 1.6 but it can happen on any Java version and servlet container I think. I also had Adobe ColdFusion 8 deployed on this setup, and I got an error there when running the same code. The error from Adobe CF looked like:

The solution was to put the tools.jar file thats located in your installed JDK/lib directory into your CLASSPATH. I did this just by copying the file into Tomcat’s “lib” directory. You could also just copy the file to bluedragon’s WEB-INF/lib directory. This solved the problem in both OpenBD and Adobe CF8. I noticed that there was already a tools.jar file in my deployed CF8 directory at ./WEB-INF/cfusion/lib/tools.jar. I think thats why the Adobe CF error was different – it wasn’t complaining about a class not found like OpenBD, it was complaining about a “wrong version” problem. So I’m guessing the tools.jar file that Adobe includes isn’t compatible with Tomcat or with my JVM or something. Maybe thats why Open BlueDragon doesn’t include a tools.jar file in their distribution (it would also increase their file size by about 50%!)

When I asked about why this was needed on the OpenBD mailing this I got this response:

wsdl2java is used to generate Java stubs for the client and end point of
CFML based web services. This library generates java (not compiled) and
tools.jar contains the javac compiler, which is needed to compile the java
that wsdl2java spits out.

Interesting to note that Railo did not need this fix, they must be using a completely different method for consuming web services.

The administrator is very full featured with everything you would expect – scheduled tasks, ability to create database connections to MySQL and MSSQL (among several others), and search! Railo has Apache Lucene built right in. Creating a new Lucene index is as easy as creating Verity collection in Adobe ColdFusion. The cfsearch/cfindex tags work like you would expect them to, with a few exceptions. You can even populate and search the collection right from within the administrator.

I was happy to see that you can define multiple SMTP servers. Railo will try each of them in order if any of them are unavailable.

I also really like the way Railo has done the administrator – with one global administrator (called the server administrator) and then administrators for each site (called a web administrator). I think this is going to make it much easier for hosting companies to offer CFML support.