Phil Cruz

Imagine going to buy a new car. You are down to specifying the options for the vehicle and the salesman says, "You can have it in any color as long as it's black." If black is your favorite color that's great; but if it's not, then maybe they have just lost a customer. These days it's all about giving people choices. Until recently, if you were developing ColdFusion applications you didn't have much choice. Macromedia was the only vendor providing a ColdFusion application server. Now, BlueDragon from New Atlanta has arrived to change all that. [Note: BlueDragon was originally a product called tagServlet developed by n-ary Limited. So it's not entirely new.] I have taken some time to check out BlueDragon, and here is what I have seen. What Is BlueDragon? In a nutshell, BlueDragon is a family of Java-based products that implement the CFML (5.0) language. (There are a ... (more)

BlueDragon 6.1

If you haven't heard of BlueDragon, you're either new to the ColdFusion/CFML community or you've been under a rock somewhere. Back in September 2002, New Atlanta forever changed the CF landscape when it introduced BlueDragon 3.0. As a quick overview, BlueDragon is a family of server products that allows you to deploy CFML applications as an alternative to using Macromedia's ColdFusion MX. For more background, I refer you to the original product review I did for ColdFusion Developer's Journal, www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/articleprint.cfm?id=546. For this article, I am going to foc... (more)

CFEverywhere Part 3

After somewhat of a hiatus, we're back to continue and conclude our CFEverywhere journey. I should note that Dick Applebaum, my copilot for parts 1 and 2, was unable to join me for this last installment. It won't be the same without his contribution but we'll have to make do. Moreover, as Dick provided the knowledge for the Mac side of things, I'll have to apologize in advance for the lack of detail on that front. In the previous articles, we demonstrated how to deploy a CFML application into a self-contained package. We used BlueDragon, Jetty, and Derby to create a fully dynami... (more)

ColdFusion Everywhere PART 1

Think about the last time you bought a car. Did you walk around the vehicle, look under the hood and sit in the driver's seat to get a feel for it? You probably took it for a test-drive before making the final decision. If you're a developer producing the next "killer app," it's only reasonable for your customers to want to test-drive your application as well. Have you ever wanted to demo your application but thought... It's too difficult to put together a general-purpose demo. Even if you did publish a "live" demo site, it would be open to wrong-headed visitors entering offensiv... (more)

ColdFusion Everywhere PART 2

When we last left our two intrepid heroes they had just shown us how to create and run our first CFEverywhere application (including installing and configuring its requisite CFML server, application server, and Web server). Once installed, we were able to move our "package" (application and accompanying servers) to any hard drive and run it without change (we will exploit this capability later). In Part 1 we: Discussed the reasons and advantages of deploying applications as CFEverywhere packages Examined some applications that would benefit from this approach Installed the Jetty J... (more)