Adobe ColdFusion 9 on MAC Lion - Fix for Hanging Admin

First let me start off that I am not a MAC owner and therefore please keep this in mind.

One of the issues with ACF9 on MAC is the use of the java.awt package to get items like the list of available printers.  The AWT package is just a wrapper for a packages that are native on the target operating system.  In this case, there are bugs in the apple.awt.CToolkit class that is the problem on MAC.

We were having an issue with Mach-II 1.9 hanging on MAC Lion recently and we narrowed it done to our use of java.awt.Toolkit.  You can indicate to the JVM that you want to use the sun.awt.* package instead which appears to have fixed the issue for Mach-II 1.9 for MAC Lion users.  The positive side effect is that it fixed the hung "Info" page in the CFIDE as well.

You probably already have headless=true in your jvm.config file, however you need another directive to use a different awt toolkit otherwise the JVM will default the buggy apple.awt toolkit.

Let me know if this fixes other ACF9 issues on MAC Lion like cfdocument.

-Djava.awt.headless=true
-Dawt.toolkit=sun.awt.HToolkit
via blog.maestropublishing.com

This also fixes an issue with Mach-II 1.9 on ACF9 with CHF2 running on MAC Lion.

Free Mach-II Training at OpenCF Summit 2012 plus Hackfest

Free Mach-II Training

GreatBizTools, our commercial sponsor of Mach-II, is a sponsor of OpenCF Summit again in 2012. - February 24-26, 2012. This year's conference schedule is going to be slightly different this year with the unconference sessions and other trainings happening on Day 1 - Friday, Feburary 24th, 2012.

We're proud to announce that Team Mach-II is going to be offering FREE jumpstart to Mach-II and ColdSpring using OOP development techniques at OpenCFSummit 2012!

Where: OpenCF Summit, Dallas TX
When: Day 1 - February 24th, 2012
Cost: Free

We don't have exact details on the start/end times for Day 1 at the conference. If you want to get a leg up on OOP development using a framework in CFML, this is the year to come to the conference. Once we get more details lined up, you will be able to reserve your space at the Mach-II training.

HackFest at OpenCF Summit

Team Mach-II is running the annual Hackfest at the conference which runs all three days of the conference.  What is a Hackfest you ask?  It's an event where programmers meet for collaborative programming.  During the hackfest, we'll be building an open-source application for a non-profit. Best of all we'll be using a bunch of open-source technologies such as OpenBD, Railo, Apache, ColdSpring, Mach-II, JQuery, HSQL, OpenBD Desktop, and others.

We learned a lot about how to organize a HackFest from the 2011 conference and we're working hard to build upon last year's success to make this year's HackFest even better!

See you in February!

Mach-II Tips: Canonical Links

With the advent of dynamic database driven pages many moons ago, you can probably access the same information from multiple URLs.  How does that affect your Google rankings?  Probably adversely.  Enter the canonical URLs via an HTML meta tag which you put in the head part of your document:

 <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/directory/page.html" />

Canonical URLs allows webmasters to provide a "preferred" or "canonical" link that specifies the preferred version of the webpage as part of SEO.  If you have multiple ways to get at the same content, then you should be specifying a canonical link to the preferred URL for SEO.

According to Google, canonical links are just a directive but "strongly honored" accord Google search guru Matt Cutts. So it's about time you start thinking of canonical URLs.

Luckily for us, Mach-II makes it easy to create.  Here is an example using the Mach-II view custom tag library:

 <cfimport prefix="view" taglib="/MachII/customtags/view/" />  <view:link type="canonical" route="productsServices.certification.features" />

We support a multitude of attributes from event, route and hrefs.  Be sure to check out the documentation on using <view:link /> custom tag in Mach-II for more information.