ColdFusion Muse

Muse Reviews: Charlie Arehart on ColdFusion 10 Server Options at Cfobjective

I'm sitting in on Charlie Areharts workshop regarding how ColdFusion 10 and Tomcat live together and how to configure it. It's obvious that a good deal of my specialized JRUN knowledge will be less than useful in a couple years but I'm really excited about the change. Charlie does a good job of identifying:

• Where everything is at - log files and config files live in new locations now.
• What should you watch for - lots of new files and folders that may or may not be useful to fool with.
• What you should not be paying attention to. Tomcat is an app server that can do far more than just serve up jsp (or cfm) files. Charlie spent some time helping us understand what to ignore.

Of Note...

Charlie identified a Tomcat filter (valve) called CralwerSessionManager that can truncate a session for an indexing bot to be very short-lived. That could be very useful for high traffic sites as those of you who have written extensive bot checking code to shorten the session timeout can attest. This would handle that automatically (if I understand what he's saying) at the server app level. He also identified some "listeners" that look interesting. I'm really looking forward to understanding more about Tomcat.

One of the new features is to save sessions after a restart. to do this you have to modify context.xml by uncommenting a node and adding a path. The Muse will try to write this up in his own style at some point. The gotchas are that it has to be a graceful shutdown (not a crash) and it can be a lengthy process which may negate the purpose on a busy server with a great many sessions. Still, under certain circumstances it would be a real plus I think. Another option is to use the built in Tomcat Persistent Session Manager which is able to save to a database or individual files.

Resources

As usual Charlie's presentation is replete with tons of URL resources so I'm going to point you to his site Carehart.org.