There is an excellent, albeit long, post by Marc Funaro entitled "How OO Almost Destroyed My Business"

In short, the article describes how going to the effort of applying Java OO rules to CF's dynamic behavior on every project can take you away from your main goal.

I do agree with some of the points made but I think there is something everyone has got to remember. OO is a must for some languages, but when it comes to ColdFusion you're allowed to make a choice on your coding style for the application you are building. If you come from an OO background and you want your recordset as an object do it, use Transfer or another ORM and apply it. If you just want to organise your logic away from your views you can use CFC's to simply handle that. If you are building a 3 page leaflet site then you can throw one together using procedural code with <cfmodule> to wrap a layout around 3 .cfm pages. Thats the beauty of CF and it always will be.

From my point of view when building an application my goal is plain, make sure the client get a solid app and to do this it's simple: organise your code, stick to a particular methodology or framework, and remain consistent. If you do this you will always be able to revisit your application and make changes quickly and efficiently regardless of your coding style.

With all that said, always find out what the next guy is learning/teaching and give it a try. But after that don't be afraid to say it doesn't fit what I am working on currently so I'm moving on.

Please update your bookmarks and feeds for my site.

I now have a Mango Blog at:

http://www.andyjarrett.com/blog

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/andyjarrett

This was meant to be a guide about setting up your server with Linux, Railo, Apache, and MySQL but I've dropped Apache. Why? Well its an overhead I don't need. Resin functions perfectly well as a HTTP server and it does all I need. Why add another bit of software to fail? .... simplify :) In the long run I might change but for now I'd rather save the resources.

So ... where did this guide come from considering there are quite a few guides for this setup? Well for one reason or another I just didn't get on with them and by the end something went wrong which was mainly because I am Mac boy more than a Linux guy and sometimes I just missed the points here and there. The aim of my guide is to be clear and simple. So with a fresh Ubuntu install i'm planning on gettingt Railo running via Resin so I can call http://www.mysite.com/index.cfm

I won't lie, to make this post I have "borrowed" from other sources out there which I will try and link to at the end.

Im running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) without a graphical interface.

Note: If you are doing this on a clean, new server then before you even read on check out Slicehost.com documentation about setting up a Ubuntu server. These guides are the best and clearest I've seen online to date and cover everything you need!!!!

1. http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/11/28/ubuntu-intrepid-setup-page-1
2. http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/11/28/ubuntu-intrepid-setup-page-2

On to Railo

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I'll be honest, I don't have much linux experience. I've always liked the idea of Linux and a command line driven OS but as soon as I see the GUI I tend point and click, which means I don't learn anything new. Then comes along JeOS (Just enough OS, pronounced as "juice") from Ubuntu which doesn't give you a GUI, it just gives you the bare minimum to run a server. It's designed for VM's and perfect for running a Subversion server on your local machine in the background. The specs are:

• Less than 100Mb ISO image
• Less than 300Mb installed footprint
• Specialised -virtual Kernel 2.6.24
• Optimised for VMWare ESX, VMWare Server and KVM
  
• Intel or AMD x86 architecture
• Minimum memory 128M
• No graphical environment preloaded as it is aimed at server virtual appliance

So with JeOS and VMWare Fusion armed I was ready to setup a light-weight Subversion and Apache server. Below documents what I did to get a single SVN repository up and running. Im not installing Trac or SSL with this just so you know. I might try and cover them later, along with multiple repositories.

Setting up JeOS with VMWare fusion is no different than setting up any other VM so I won't go over that here. I'll assume that you can do that, and have done that and now at the command prompt.

Obviously because there is no GUI supplied all commands have to be run from the Command Line/Terminal. This also means editing txt files from the terminal too. If you've never used VIMM you might want to have the following URL handy www.gnulamp.com/vi.html

First things first, lets make sure your install is up-to-date.

$ sudo apt-get update

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<!-- First we create our global vars in the Application scope -->
<cfset application.settings = structNew() />
<!-- Add our DSN name to the Settings struct -->
<cfset application.settings.dsn = "myDSN" />
<!-- If our bean factory doesn't exist then we create it. You could also check for a url.reinit var as well here -->
<cfif NOT isDefined("application.beanFactory")>
<!-- Our struct to hold the variables we are going to pass to ColdSpring -->
<cfset properties = structNew() />
<!-- Our struct to hold the variables we are going to pass to ColdSpring -->
<cfset properties.dsn = "dsn_reference">
<!-- Create our bean object -->
<cfset application.beanFactory = createObject("component","coldspring.beans.DefaultXmlBeanFactory").init(structNew(), properties)/>
<!-- Pass a fully qualified path to a bean definition xml file -->
<cfset application.beanFactory.loadBeansFromXmlFile(expandPath('/config/beans.xml'), true)/>
</cfif>

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<package name="post">
<object name="Post" table="post_table">
<id name="postid" column="postid" type="numeric"/>
<property name="postText" type="string" column="postText" />
<property name="postDate" type="date" column="postDate" />
</object>
</package>

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The other title was, How I added the FeedBurer URL to BlogCFC - imagine whatever your prefer :o)
If you haven't heard Feedburner has recently been acquired by Google. Which as it seems with all Google acquisitions means us users end up getting something free out of it and to with keep up traditions Feedburner now offer their "Pro" services for free.

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Critter on a previous post asked "if you can pass in attributes to the build.xml file?" From the Terminal this is as easy as adding another argument "-D".

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I'm gonna try and cover the two OS's here so be kind.

First things first, goto http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi and download the appropriate archive (zip) file: apache-ant-[VERSION NUMBER HERE]-bin.zip

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