Installing Coldfusion and JRun on OS X

99miles — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:21:53 +0000

I spent a lot of time getting ColdFusion to run on Leopard. I wish I had kept better track of all the errors I sorted through on path to figuring it out, but unfortunately I didn’t.
Here were the biggies though. First make sure to get Update 7 for JRun. I didn’t find the updates at first which slowed me down.
Additionally (and the most frustrating), is it turned out that setting java.home in jvm.config was not enough to make JRun use the specified JRE. I wanted it to use JVM 1.5.0. Running ‘./jrun -info’ (from the JRun bin directory) returned “Apple Inc. 1.5.0_13-119 Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM”, so it appeared to be finding the JVM I wanted it to use, but it wasn’t working. So I set the classpath in ~/.bash_profile as well. That didn’t cut it either. Finally I found Steven Erat’s entry where he had similar issues.
What did resolve it was to change the CurrentJDK alias in System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions in addition to the changes already made.
Steven’s entry has good directions on how to do so. It seemed to me that setting java.home in jvm.config should have taken care of everything, but it didn’t You can to set the JVM in 3 places.
Once I had it running with JDK 1.5, I’d get this error:
Error 500
Could not invoke Java compiler, please make sure jikesw is in /Applications/JRun4/bin or put a JDK bin directory in your path.
jrunx.compiler.JavaCompiler$NoCompilerFoundException: Could not invoke Java compiler, please make sure jikesw is in /Applications/JRun4/bin or put a JDK bin directory in your path.
at jrunx.compiler.JavaCompiler.outProcessCompile(JavaCompiler.java:474)
……………..
Basically it can’t find javac, and I still have no idea why. The servers running but the sample JSP’s aren’t getting compiled. You could probably just compile the apps manually but I haven’t done that.
Well, there’s no great solution here, but hopefully this’ll help you to get going with whatever you decide. The problem with changing the CurrentJDK alias to 1.4.2 is that then everything on your system will be using that. That’s a hassle for me with all my Eclipse installs, etc where I need JDK 1.5.

Flex and ColdFusion: RemoteObjects and WebServices

99miles — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:33:57 +0000

Once you have a ColdFusion CFC you can call it’s methods with a RemoteObject or via a WebService.
RemoteObjects are usually preferred for their performance speed.

Here we’ll create a super basic example of calling a CFC from both a WebService and a RemoteObject. The application will simply let you enter your name, click a button, call the CFC and return a welcome message including your name.

To set up our examples, let create a most basic CFC. Let’s call this file NEWCFComponent.cfc and this’ll be it’s contents:

 <cfcomponent displayname="CF_Service" output="false"> <cffunction name="WelcomeMsg" access="remote" returntype="string"> <cfargument name="name" type="string" required="yes"> <cfreturn "YO, #name#!"> </cffunction> </cfcomponent> 

You can see this simply takes the #name# variable that it retrieves and returns the welcome message “Yo, #name#!”.

Okay, let’s first call this with a WebService. Just create a basic local Flex project.
Here’s the main application for that project:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent; import mx.rpc.Fault; import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent; private function onResult( e : ResultEvent ) :void { msg.text = e.result.toString(); } private function onFault( e : FaultEvent ) :void { trace( 'Oops!' ); } ]]> </mx:Script> <mx:WebService id="ws" wsdl="http://<server-name-or-IP>:8500/cf/CF_Service/NewCFComponent.cfc?wsdl” showBusyCursor=”true”> <mx:operation name="WelcomeMsg" result="onResult(event)" fault="onFault(event)"> <mx:request xmlns=""> <name> {_name.text} </name> </mx:request> </mx:operation> </mx:WebService> <mx:Button x="284" y="10" label="Get Welcome Message." click="ws.WelcomeMsg.send()"/> <mx:TextInput id="msg" x="681" y="10"/> <mx:TextInput id="_name" x="116" y="10"/> <mx:Label x="10" y="12" text="Enter your name:"/> </mx:Application> 

Modify the ‘wsdl’ attribute of the WebService tag as necessary to point to your CF server.

That’s it! Now Run the Flex app, enter your name, click the button and see your welcome message!

Now let’s do the same thing but use a RemoteObject.

Create a Flex Project and in the Flex Project Wizard choose ‘ColdFusion’ for the server type and ‘ColdFusion Flash Remoting’. Point the ‘Web root’ and ‘Root URL’ to your CF server.

Use the same contents for the Flex application as above except remove the WebService tag and all it’s contents, and put this in it’s place:

 <mx:RemoteObject id="ws" destination="ColdFusion" source="cf.CF_Service.NewCFComponent"> <mx:method name="WelcomeMsg" result="onResult(event)" fault="onFault(event)"/> </mx:RemoteObject> 

The ‘destination’ is the remote destination as defined in remoting-config.xml (located in the /WEB-INF/flex directory). ‘ColdFusion’ is a pre-defined, built-in destination.
The ‘source’ attribute should point to the location of your CFC starting at the server root. Note that this does not include the CFC extension, just the name of the CFC.

Go ahead and run the app and it should behave just the same as the WebService version we created above, but maybe faster.

If you want to create you own destination you can do that easily. Open remoting-config.xml (located in the /WEB-INF/flex directory and add this destination:

 <destination id="cfRemotingExample"> <channels> <channel ref="my-cfamf"/> </channels> <properties> cf.CF_Service.NewCFComponent</source>  <access>  <use-mappings>false</use-mappings>  <method-access-level>remote</method-access-level> </access> <property-case>  <force-cfc-lowercase>false</force-cfc-lowercase>  <force-query-lowercase>false</force-query-lowercase>  <force-struct-lowercase>false</force-struct-lowercase> </property-case> </properties> </destination> 

The ‘source’ attribute should point to the location of your CFC starting at the server root. This should be identical to the ‘source’ attribute you had in your RemoteObject tag.

Now a couple quick modifications to the RemoteObject and we’re good to go:

 <mx:RemoteObject id="ws" destination="cfRemotingExample" showBusyCursor="true"> <mx:method name="WelcomeMsg" result="onResult(event)" fault="onFault(event)"/> </mx:RemoteObject> 

Notice we just changed the ‘destination’ attribute to point to our new destination name, and we removed the ‘source’ attribute because we included that in the of our custom destination in remoting.config.xml.
For now we’ll just use the default remote destination configured in remoting-config.xml (located in the /WEB-INF/flex directory)

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Installing Coldfusion and JRun on OS X

Flex and ColdFusion: RemoteObjects and WebServices