Cflogin on a cluster.

I spent this week configuring ColdFusion 8’s security framework to operate on a clustered server environment. One of our client is using two windows servers with CF8 enterprise edition running on them. They are in a clustered configuration, and using J2EE session variables.

One item that we found important to note is that develops need to be aware that cf stores the user role in a local variable, not in the cookie itself. While this is good for security, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass as it requires you to re-authenticate the user as you move over to the second server. We settled on using the OnRequestStart function in Application.cfc .

At first we had wanted to store the login authorization using the application variable:

loginstorage = “session”

After a few tries it became apparent that the servers where not passing on the authorization variable in the session information. Everytime the alternate server kicked in, the user would get logged out, because the variable was not carried over.

loginstorage = “cookie”

Did do the trick however… I am interested in finding out if anyone out there has any experience using the loginstorage = “session” in a clustered environment?

Relational Deletes in MySql and Foreign Keys

Managing relational tables in a database is a topic that all developer will eventually bump into. There are quite a few ways of managing relational data, and the best solution sometimes can be hard to find. As a developer you have to look at the scope of the application, the types of tools you have on hand, and where you want the responsibility for the referential integrity to reside. The most often used ways of maintaining referential integrity are as follows:

Double Happiness Creations Flex Store Launch.

We’ve just completed cool little application for Yvonne Wong’s company Double Happiness Creations. She specializes in creating custom greetings and invitations. When you take a look at her work, it’s pretty obvious that she needs something a little bit out of the ordinary when it came to the buying experience, so w put together this little application to help sell her cards online. It utilizes flex and ColdFusion, and simply sends the order info in an XML format. You can check out the store here http://doublehappinesscreations.com

Removing Default Apollo Chrome

Just change this:

<mx:ApolloApplication>

To this:

<mx:Application>

Thats pretty much it. I don’t think that this is in the Apollo documentation that came with the alpha. Had to carefully examine the WeatherStation sample app.

Building Up Babylon

Components for the project x server came today. We used a company out of Boston called Thinkmate. Have to give those guys a big thumbs up. They put the servers together in record time, and got them out to us asap. I will never, ever however place 3 servers in such a tight cabinet. My elbows are still missing skin.

Consuming a StrikeIron.com Webservice in ColdFusion

Built out a currency converter for a project we are working on over here. After looking at a couple options, decided to use StrikeIron.com’s currency web service. It was a bit tricky to put together, as I was having no luck using the <cfinvoke> tags, and trying to pass the authentication info as arguments. Finally broke down and looked at their documentation.