Does anyone know of an SMTP event gateway for ColdFusion>

What I'm looking for, is a way of implementing helpdesk type functionality, whereby any emails to a certain domain are handled by ColdFusion according to a set of rules (e.g. create new issue - add comment to an exiting issue etc.)

It struck me that it should be relatively straightforward to handle incoming SMTP transmissions using a ColdFusion Event Gateway (seeing as SMTP is a relatively simple text based prtocol...) - and I wondered if anyone had already done it - and if not - why not? (I'm presuming I must have overlooked something that would make it more complicated than I anticipate...)

I'm in the process of specifying a new web server, which will be running ColdFusion 8.01 Enterprise (as well as IIS etc.).

The server will be running ~6 active instances of ColdFusion - and will initially be configured with 4GB RAM - with the option of upgrading in the future as required.

We will be using Windows 2003 Enterprise as the operating system.

What will the benefits and downsides be of going for the x64 OS compared with the x32 OS, taking the following into consideration:

• The system will only be used as web application server
• The system will initially be set up with 4GB RAM - and will never have more than 8GB.
• The high number of instances of CF mean that if we did set the JVM Heap size over the ~1200 MB x32 limit, then we'd run a distinct possibility of running out of memory. (The reason for having so many instances of CF is to enable separation of CF Mail queues - 2 of the instances don't get any front end traffic at all, and are just responsible for sending out large batches of email)

Any advice would be appreciated...

Got back home from Scotch on the Rocks - just wanted to publicly thank all those involved with Scotch on the Rocks.

In particular I want to thank Andy Allan and his wife Leanne for the huge amount of time and resource they have given to make this conference the best ever European ColdFusion conference, together with Kev, Stephen and others.

I also want to thank all the speakers - All the presentations I attended were interesting - and some were particularly relevant to where I am now as a developer.

The networking was great - it was particularly good to be able to chat with some of the guys who are leaders within the community - I think this can be even more valuable in many occasions than the sessions - as well as the interaction with Adobe staff.

Thanks Everyone.

ColdFusion by default stores log files in 2 locations, dependant on the type:

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I have come across the following issue when attempting to persist a CFC to the Coldfusion Application scope, when the the CFC method had been invoked remotely.

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Be careful when setting up a root ColdFusion mapping, where the ColdFusion root and the web server root are not the same location.

On our standard Development machines, we are running IIS on Windows XP, and have been developing against 3 versions of ColdFusion.

We set up 3 IIS virtual directories (/cf5, /cf6, /cf7) each pointing to a subdirectory of our sites folder (c:\sites\cf5, c:\sites\cf6, c:\sites\cf7 etc.) - with the corresponding version of CF handling each virtual folder.

Within each version of CF, we set up a root mapping - e.g. for CF7: / = c:\sites\cf7, in order to allow the CF Mapping path to be consistent between development machines and production servers.

This works fine for most occasions - the IIS virtual directory normally has nothing to do with the CF Mapping - however there are a couple of exceptions:

• Using the Application.cfc OnRequest Method: (CF will set arguments.targetpage to equal the IIS path)
• When attempting to invoke a CFC as a webservice (error: Could not resolve CFC datatype)

Both of these issues can be resolved by setting up a CF mapping to match the web server virtual directory mapping (e.g. /CF7 = c:\sites\cf7)

I struggled with this over most of the weekend - and eventually came to the conclusion that flex / CF integration does not work using CFMX 7.02 on Ubuntu.

This appears to be a known issue (at least for Red Hat) - logged here

Any flex requests to CFC's are met with flex/messaging/io/amf/UnknownTypeException.

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Its definately harder than windows - but I have managed to get ColdFusion 7.02 Server running on Apache, on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

My previous experience with Linux is very limited to say the least - and most of the issues I ran into were due to misunderstandings on my part about how linux works...

Main issues i ran into:

• Ubuntu does not have a root account (not strictly true - but when I though it was asking me for a root password - it was actually asking for my password...)
• Could not execute ColdFusion installer after I had downloaded it (not marked as executeable - chmod +x)
• I really don't understand linux permissions - I want to be able to create and edit docs in /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ without having to sudo (I'm sure this one will seem more logical when its not 3am!
• Had an issue with the connector for apache - the one that is distributed with CF is not compatible with Apache 2.2 (there is a hotfix downloadable from adobe for this, which worked)

All in all, I don't think 4 hours was too bad, baring in mind my inexperience with linux etc.

I have to say, I'm very impressed with VMware player - about 100 billion times faster than MS Virtual PC!

A big thankyou goes to Dave Shuck for his excellent post on Installing CFMX7 & Apache2.2.2 on Ubuntu - Without this I think I would have been totally lost...

I'll post more when its not 3am - and I've had more chance to get everything setup how I want.

(Basically I'm trying to create an environment that I can dev in (and potentially move to other machines) when I'm not using my primary development machine - I have a lightweight laptop that I normally use when I'm not in the office - but I often want to quickly play with something in CF. I didn't want to break my existing windows installation on this machine by installing a load of server / development software - so I thought I'd build a virtual machine - using ubuntu rather than windows to avoid licensing (and hopefully performance) issues!)

This one had me banging my head against the wall for a while...

Upon the recommendation of Adobe Technical support, we set the clientmanagement attribute within the cfapplication tag within a number of our applications to "no" (from the previous value of "yes") due to problems with stability of ColdFusion on a server recieving high levels of traffic.

He said to disable client management unless we were making use of client variables within our application.

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I am in the process of creating a template application, using the following frameworks:

• Fusebox 5.1
• ColdSping
• Transfer

We have tried to only have files within the web root, which should be accessible directly within the browser.

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Anatomy of a Framework - Mach-II - Part I

Brian Rinaldi gives a walkthrough of what happens when the Mach-II framework initialises.

Hopefully this will be the first of many articles - Brian is planning to disect a number of Frameworks - including Mach-II, Model-Glue, Fusebox and ColdBox, depedant on the interest generated...