Just to let anyone who might be reading this blog with it’s infrequent post know that this blog address is dying. I am now going to be using forthedeveloper.com for any new blog posts. There are also plans to team up with a couple of other developers that I know and work with, so go there and get the new rss feed going…
Thanks for reading!
Wow, i hadn’t realized how close in version numbers the two things are…
I was thinking today of how many crazy things that I try to do, how many of them don’t work, and how many of them I don’t share when they do. So today I attempt to share a successful install of ColdFusion 8 (developer version) on my Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit box.
For this installation I am going to connect it to my apache 2 installation. So if you do not have apache or do not want to connect it to apache then just skip that part.
To start off I downloaded the coldfusion-801-lin64.bin file from Adobe.
Once I had the file I made it executable:
$ sudo chmod +x coldfusion-801-lin64.bin
Now it is time to run the installer:
$ sudo ./coldfusion-801-lin64.bin
At first the installer extracts the files for installation then brings up the menu to select the locale. I speak only english so luckily there was the option for english.
Next they give you a nice introduction telling you that you are installing ColdFusion and you can go back in the installer by typing ‘back’ and you can exit the installer by typing ‘quit’. ( I pressed ‘enter’. )
Next we go through the wonderful License Agreement for using ColdFusion. You should probably read it, but since I am only installing the developer version I didn’t pay much attention and pressed enter a lot until I got to the question of if I accept. Then I pressed ‘Y’ and ‘enter’.
Next the installer goes through a pre-installation check to see if your computer has everything that is needed by ColdFusion. My box unfortunately pulled up a warning telling me:
The installer was unable to determine if libstdc++.so.5 is available. The library is necessary for C++ custom tags, webservices and some cfimage functionality to work properly.
When I checked my packages I have libstdc++6 installed. I’m no linux guru, just trying to learn more about it, but I continued the installation in spite of the warning. I’ll write a new post later if this comes back to bite me. So I pressed ‘enter’ and ignored the warning.
For my wonderful installation attempt I chose to select the Developer Edition since I am not rich and this is only for local development anyways. If you are rich, or want to install any of the other options, go ahead, I just may not have the same options that you do.
Next it asks for the installer configuration that I would like to use. At first I thought that I would like to go with the multi-server install, but I have tried playing around with it in the past and it just seemed overkill for what I wanted to do for my development so I chose to do just a regular ’server configuration’. I also found it interesting they decided to include a second semi-colon on this menu, adds a nice touch.
Ofttimes it doesn’t do well to have ColdFusion already installed and install it again. So the next step asks to make sure you don’t already have ColdFusion installed. I do not so i answer no.
The next part is where you get to do whatever set of addons you want. For my install I did not want the documentation since I use livedocs, and I didn’t want LiveCycle and Search Services since they would be overkill and overhead. I also removed the option to start ColdFusion on system init since I am not always developing on it and plan on having a bash script to start it up and shut it down when needed.
I went with the default for the install directory ( /opt/coldfusion8 ). I have no reason to change it and don’t know enough about linux to slap myself for doing it.
No previous version of ColdFusion installed so the next option was a no.
Configuring webservers is what I have had the most trouble with while trying to install ColdFusion before so I’ll see if I can get it right. I selected the ‘Add Web Server Configuration’ option to try and attach it to apache.
I am running apache so I selected the ‘Apache’ option.
If you would like a handy reference for where your files are for apache check out this post from the crumb.
Next it asks for the directory that contains the httpd.conf file. On this box that the path is:
/etc/apache2
Next is asked for the binary file for apache:
/usr/sbin/apache2
And for the control file used to start and stop apache:
/usr/sbin/apache2ctl
Next it shows the menu about web server configuration. But since I have done my damage I just tell it to ‘Continue with Installation’.
For the administrator location I chose ‘/var/www’ so that it is out there where I can get to it without a lot of changes.
The runtime user is something that I wasn’t sure of, but one of my sys-admin friends told me to use the www-data user for it so that is what i used.
My password for my home dev server I put as ‘1d10t’. And if you want to buy some nice insurance I know a guy….
RDS is one of those things that you hear about… but just never used. At least it is for me. So this time I am going to try out the RDS option this time and see what it can do for me. For that password I chose ‘t01d1′.
Now it shows the installation summary of what it is about to do.
Installation Type:
Server configurationLicensing:
Developer EditionInstallation Directories:
Product: /opt/coldfusion8
Web root: /var/wwwServer Information:
Web Server: Apache (/etc/apache2)
Port:
Search Services: not installed
Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES: not installed
Documentation: not installed
RDS: enabledDisk Space Information (for Installation Target):
Required: 432,138,779 bytes
Available: 198,957,346,816 bytes
Press enter and it whirls away in ASCII to install your ColdFusion 8 server.
Yeah:
You have successfully completed the first step in installing Adobe ColdFusion 8.
To continue with your installation, go to /opt/coldfusion8/bin and type “./coldfusion start” to start your server.
Once the server, is started log in to the Configuration Wizard at http://[machinename]/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm
Next to see if the ColdFusion server will startup.
$ cd /opt/coldfusion8/bin
$ sudo ./coldfusion start
From past experience if I don’t start the Coldfusion service as root it gives me some strange errors and things do not work right. So here i just told it to startup as root from the beginning.
Starting ColdFusion 8…
The ColdFusion 8 server is starting up and will be available shortly.
======================================================================
Running the ColdFusion 8 connector wizard
======================================================================
Configuring the web server connector (Launched on the first run of the ColdFusion 8 start script)
Running apache connector wizard…
Connector installation succeeded for apache
======================================================================
ColdFusion 8 has been started.
ColdFusion 8 will write logs to /opt/coldfusion8/logs/cfserver.log
======================================================================
Now to test it out. I loaded up my localhost/CFIDE/administrator/ and it pulls up the coldfusion administrator. Looks good to me. Went through the administrator and setup a couple of things, tested out a cfm page in the root. All seems to be working well… good job Adobe.
Just looking at the Google IO T-Shirt for this year’s attendees and it appears they spelled GOOGLEIO wrong. I was curious as I was sitting in a session and typed in the binary that is on the shirt and it came out GOOGLEKO.
Here is my translation of the shirt to binary:
0100011101001111010011110100011101001100010001010100101101001111
Here is what that is translated:
GOOGLEKO
Just something interesting, we’ll see if it is true.
UPDATE: Thanks TechCrunch for verifying the shirt for me!
Well, I must say, I didn’t bust so i must have made it to cf.objective(). I flew in the afternoon before, saw a little of the area around the hotel, ate some awesome chicken and waited for the start of the learning fiesta.
There are several different people that have posted already on most of the things that happened at the cf.objective() conference so you can definitely check them out to get more info on the sessions. Here I will note my overall feelings about the conference after I have been back from the conference for a week or two.
After things have had a chance to settle in my mind I still have a very positive attitude about the conference. There was just an amazing atmosphere of sharing and growth present. One of the things that I really enjoyed was the interaction with the people that you quite literally only read about. Going to each of the sessions I was able to not only listen to some very well prepared presentations but also talk with the presenter and ask questions. One of the things that bugged me going to a larger conference last year was that it felt too institutionalized. At cf.objective() the only barrier to talking to the presenters were the standard personal barriers of approaching unfamiliar people.
In addition to the speakers, the conference was an excellent time to rethink some of the things that I have been learning and implementing. One of the nights after the sessions were over I was talking with a co-worker about some of the design patterns that had been touched on and how we are implementing them. During that discussion we decided that we have been calling a couple of our code the incorrect names. To me that was one of the awesome things about conferences: the ability to rethink your position and put together the things that have been previously decided.
I found the introspection to be almost as valuable as the actual content that was discussed… almost. I was definately impressed by the topics that were chosen. Every session I had a class that I wanted to attend, even more than one most times, and all but 1 or 2 of them were excellent sessions. Coming back I have more information about automating processes, testing code, and design patterns than previously. It has been awesome to learn and question, but the best part is the stimulus to the cranium that comes as an afterthought. Coming back from the conference has given me extra incentive to be creative and try new things.
Ultimately that is the best part of programming: the ability to analyze projects and come up with creative and/or innovative sollutions to them. I strongly believe that is one of the things I love most about developing applications. To me the ability to discover creative solutions is what makes it worth it.
Welcome to the humble abode of me.
By way of introduction, my name is Randy Merrill. I am currently a unstudious student studying Management Information Technology at Utah State University who happens to also be employed by said university as a full-time Web Developer.
As for the fun hobbies, such as they are, I spend a lot of my free time programming. ( I know, it’s great fun! ) Now before you get any grand ideas about me being a smart individual I will stop you in your tracks to tell you that I am a terrible student, don’t know how to hack, and spend most of my time trying to figure out ways not to program so much ( aka lazy ).
On the professional end of things, I do work full time with the University as part of the Programming and Design Team in the Information Technology department. Basically we are trying to improve the university’s websites one at a time. I originally started working on web sites for the university as a student in 2005 and got hired on full-time by IT this past year.
Since being hired on full-time the majority of my time has been spent on a ColdFusion portal system for the university. Our goal is to try and launch the portal at the end of the Summer as school starts again but time has a way of catching up to projects so we’ll see how it goes.
My base of knowledge in programming stems from courses I took my first year as Utah State back in 2002. Wow, I’m getting old. Anyhow, I have since taken several programming and computer science classes, but since I am not inclined to take the math necessary I will not be majoring in Computer Science. On a positive note I am graduating this Fall with my Bachelors of Science and a minor in Computer Science (I’m not a complete slackard 
). Since my original C++ courses I have programmed a little in Java but mostly focused on web languages. To date I have been working predominately with ColdFusion and PHP as my main languages. In addition I have worked with MySQL, MSSQL, and Oracle databases along with poking around in Flex and AIR.
I hope that you enjoy my ramblings as I try and share the things that I learn in the wonderful adventure called life.