UPDATE - the ACME Guide now has a permanent home here.
Given the recent discussion on CFAussie with respect to difficulty in installing CFMX 7, some workmates and I have prepared a comprehensive guide to building a development workstation using Apache, ColdFusion MX 7, MySQL and Eclipse. We call this environment ACME.
The guide covers the installation and configuration of these tools and also briefly discusses several approaches we’ve adopted over time to make our development lives easier. The people who helped me put this together are very smart cookies, so they’ve helped make the guide something pretty special.
We hope you get something out of it. It’s pretty big, but like I said, it’s comprehensive.
We’d welcome your feedback on this document - what’s good, what lacks, what we should add or remove. Your suggestions will be considered when updates are made.
If you find The ACME Guide useful in your work with ColdFusion, I’d really appreciate it if you could contribute something from my Amazon Wishlist.
ACME Guide - Current version 1.2 (released 11 September 2005, please use link at top of page)
PDF (~ 6.1Mb)FlashPaper (~ 3.0Mb)
Old versions no longer available, please use the link at the top of the page.
Very nice…thanks! I’ll look it over.
Nice overview of setting up the complete development environment.
Since you mentioned the CF Aussie thread, I think its CFTalk analog was this one by Mike Kear: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/messages.cfm/threadid:38565/forumid:4
This thread listed its utlimate resolution here: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/messages.cfm/threadid:38658/forumid:4#196678
In this rather lengthy thread, the problem boiled down to just wsconfig not being able to connect to the JRun server’s JNDI/RMI ports. The CFMX 7 server installed just fine, but the webserver wasn’t connected to CFMX yet. Mike circumvented the problem in his Windows XP development environment by using the built-in webserver on port 8500/8501, which is the recommendation for development anyway.
Problems with blocked ports and wsconfig are quite common. Not only must the known JNDI port be listening and unblocked, but JRun tells wsconfig to do a call back on a high random port number and that must also be unblocked. See: http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=alias&alias=WsconfigRandPort
So that CFTalk thread was a lot of noise for a very common problem. The worst case scenario in webserver configuration is to avoid using wsconfig and do a manual configuration instead: http://www.macromedia.com/go/tn_19575
Also, on the topic of Mysql, if using MySQL 4.1 then you might want to check this blog entry: http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=alias&alias=MySQL41
Keep up the good work. This will be a handy reference for some of the customers that call support.
(As a side note, there’s a problem with adding blog comments here if you Preview first. You can click post when previewing coz of an error, and when you go back you lose the Name/Email/URL entries. Thanks!)
Steven, thanks for the comments. Not sure what’s causing the error. Guessing it’s a combination of MT and Blacklist misbehaving somehow.
Oh, thanks for the flashpaper, I hate how hard it is to work with the pdf’s. Thanks!
I myself prefer to use MSSQL MSDE for development, even though it isn’t open source as such, it is free(?).
That doesn’t change the acronym though, so I suppose that it is an acceptable wrinkle (plus I don’t like MySQL, read some bad press for it.)