Matt Woodward (who becomes my screencast hero) has put together a screencast on how to setup Flash/Flex remoting with OpenBD. (Tip: Watch this in full screen HD)

Just a quick note that our corporate website at http://www.sixsigns.com got a new design. New designs will also soon come for our product websites, Roozani and Razuna, in the coming weeks.

A big thank you goes out to our designer!

Only one month ago, Apple released 10.5.3 and now we are getting 10.5.4. I guess this is the shortest Update release for Apple ever.

The release note for 10.5.4 can be found here and you get the Update best trough the built in Software Update. Looks like they made some major improvements for Spaces.

Over at the Gigaom Blog the people from AKF Consulting have published a list of the 10 biggest platform development mistakes. It is a good short read. I am listing the headings of the 10 mistakes below.

1. Failing to design for rollback.
2. Confusing product release with product success.
3. Assuming a new Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) will fix issues with missing delivery dates.
4. Allowing history to repeat itself.
5. Scaling through third parties.
6. Relying on QA to find your mistakes.
7. Relying on “revolutionary” or “big bang” fixes.
8. Not taking into account the multiplicative effect of failure.
9. Failing to create and incent a culture of excellence.
10. Not having a business continuity/disaster recovery plan.

Reading trough the list I am sure we all know one or two of the mistakes...

Roozani - an application that will help you organize all kinds of information and make them available for you everywhere -  got a new logo. The new logo is more in line with our other products and makes use of the same "dots" as Razuna.

By the way, if you haven't signed up for the private beta of Roozani, then I urge you to do so. There are still some open seats left. You can sign up over at http://www.roozani.com and also get to know what Roozani is all about.

Looking at my blog statistics shows that my post on "Installing the latest JRE 6 on CentOS" is one of the top positions. Also a lot of search engines referrals come to this post.

Thus I would like to give a short update to the blog post, since some things have changed since then. Also CentOS has been updated to Version 5.2 in the meantime.

The way I have done it with modifying the symbolic link in "/usr/bin/java/" still works, but it is not the recommended way to do it. Thus I follow here the path that the CentOS project has outlined. Where applicable I updated the link information. So, without further ado, let's install JRE 6 or update it to the latest Version (update 6 for 6) as of today (06/26/2008).

1. Install the "jpackage-utils" (should already be installed) with;
   "yum install -y jpackage-utils"
2. Download the JRE 1.6 from Sun. Grab the one that with "...RPM in self-extracting file".
   
3. Make the downloaded "bin" file executable and run the installation. Enter;
   "chmod +x jdk-6u1-linux-i586-rpm.bin"
   and follow with;
   "./jdk-6u1-linux-i586-rpm.bin"
   This will give you the RPM file to install.
4. Next, download the needed add on package from:
   http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/jpackage/1.7/generic/non-free/RPMS/ The file you should download starts with "java-1.6-sun........". Got it? Let's continue.
5. Now install both RPM's with;
   "rpm -Uvh jdk-6u6-linux-i586.rpm"
   and
   "rpm -Uvh java-1.6.0-sun-compat-1.6.0.06-1jpp.i586.rpm"
   (Since you might already have a older version of Java 6 installed the first will tell you that it is installed and will abort the installation. Thus separating the two installations.)
6. IF you have already modified the symbolic link under "/usr/bin/java/" then you should remove this link now! Simply issue a;
   "rm -f /usr/bin/java"
7. Now with the "alternative" system you can switch between the JVM easy. Since we want to have 1.6 running you need to set this in the alternatives. Luckily this is simply done with;
   "/usr/sbin/alternatives --config java"
   You should now see the following;
   
   Enter "2" into the selection prompt. The system has now changed the Java runtime for you to the new 6 release.
8. Test it with;
   "java -version" and you should get this;
   

That's it. You are all set with the latest Java update. With future updated of Java all you need to do is to download the JRE from Sun and install it.

Remember if you set the JAVA_HOME variable in your profile to update it as well to the new installation!

I totally missed this and saw no one blogging about it, but apparently CentOS 5.2 was released on June 24.All of our CFML Servers and websites run on CentOS.

Major changes in CentOS 5.2 compared to CentOS 5.1 are: Firefox 3, Thunderbird 2, OpenOffice.org 2.3 and Evolution 2.12 on the Desktop side, Samba 3.0.28, xen-3.2 and an upgraded kernel with lots of driver updates on the server side of the system. The release notes can be found here.

Matt Woodward put together a screencast that shows you how to build a OpenBD WAR file from the source code of the OpenBD project. Currently this is for MacOS X, but he will try to release one for Windows and Ubuntu as well.

We have been talking about bringing some new features to the table for OpenBD. Let us start with one that we were very eager to bring to the CFML community:

Amazon SimpleDB Integration right within the famous <cfquery> tag!

Getting access to this functionality is now very easy with OpenBD. We've added Simple DB functionality to our official Plugin that is available for use. This lets you build INSERT / DELETE / SELECT statements for accessing data sitting inside of Amazon SimpleDB.

The benefit of using CFQUERY for your Amazon SimpleDB API is that it literally saves you money. For each request you make of Amazon SimpleDB, it costs money. But by utilizing the inbuilt query caching of CFQUERY you don't need to query Amazon half as much as you would normally would.

Head over to the official OpenBD Blog to read up more and see some code examples.

Best of all, you don't have to wait for a release, it is available now and for you to use!

The 11.0 release of openSUSE includes more than 200 new features specific to openSUSE, a redesigned installer that makes openSUSE even easier to install, faster package management thanks to major updates in the ZYpp stack, and KDE 4, GNOME 2.22, Compiz Fusion, and much more.

There is also an interview with the openSuse product manager and here is the official announcement.

Right, there has been some talks about the CFML advisory board and why no one of the OpenBD Steering Committee has been asked to join and contribute.

Over at Sean Corfield's blog we have started to debate on that and now Ben Forta (Mr. Coldfusion himself) took the time and energy to write a rather lengthy post about this issue. As I have already stated in the comments I thank Ben for this step and I think it is a good move of Ben.

You do need to read the comments to see what is going on with OpenBD.

Undoubtedly, some people think of OpenBD still as a New Atlanta project. The Open BD Steering Committee has refuted this many times and also has posted a open letter to the community stating this fact.

Still some people during the first day at CFUnited could not hold back and said publicely that the intention of the OpenBD project is not good for the CFML community at large. I don't know why this is being said and how it came about, since the interest of the Steering Committee is to bring a open source CFML engine to the table.

In any case, the lead of the OpenBD project has been taken by Alan Williamson. He is the core developer of OpenBD and has licensed his work to New Atlanta which in turn made Blue Dragon out of it. Alan Williamson has no other bounds with New Atlanta nor does the OpenBD Steering Committee.

Even thought that this is publicly known, Alan Williamson just posted the following personal letter to the CFML Community. If you really want to know how he stands, I suggest that you read the letter now.

Judge for yourself, and don't believe the hype.

This is a direct response to the blog post of Peter Bell titled “The Future of ColdFusion: What about Blue Dragon?”

First of all I would like to mention that the OpenBD project has nothing to do with the commercial BlueDragon that is being sold by New Atlanta. Neither I nor the OpenBD Steering Committee have a commercial relationship with New Atlanta. You can read up on the latest release of the OpenBD Steering Committee were this is officially stated.

Also from reading Adam Haskell’s question, he was questioning about the OpenBD project or better said the lack of thereof in the “The future of ColdFusion” series of the mentioned author and not about BlueDragon by New Atlanta.

That said, reading Peter Bell’s reply leaves me no doubt that he among others have no clue what Open Source really means and what the OpenBD project really is. But let me explain what I really mean by saying “you have no clue”.

Open Source by definition

To quote Wikipedia:
"Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations."

Open sourcing a CFML engine like OpenBD is by no means a way to cannibalize an existing customer base (As Mr. Bell stated with; “...another commercial competitor to Adobe or an open source project that would mainly cannibalize the existing customer base..."), but is a means to give the CFML community a choice. A choice that the CFML community actually never had!

I don’t know why Mr. Bell does not like choices, but I think choice is a good thing and one of the essential motivations in life. Trough choice we can decide and with choice comes powers. It seams to me that Mr. Bell or the company he speaks for, do not want to let the CFML community to have a choice. How else does Mr.Bell justify a sentence like; “...it seems to me that the ColdFusion community would be better served if the OpenBD project didn't exist.” or “...I'm not convinced that OpenDB is on balance in the best interests of the CF community.” ?

It simply looks to me that Mr. Bell does not want to give the OpenBD project a choice or even a chance to participate in the CFML community by saying; “Right now my main hope is that Railo and Adobe find a good way of working together that is in both their individual interests and the interests of the broader community...”.

Again, he is not giving the CFML community a choice, but simply ignore the open source movement and what it means to the CFML community. Thus simply not understanding how open source and the movement behind it really works.

Do we need another proof of Mr. Bell’s ignorance about open source? Look no further, in the next sentence he states; “With the history and the current licensing terms, my concern is that OpenBD may end up hindering co-operation as I can see Adobe working together with a true open source project...”.

Mr. Bell, I simply can’t hold myself but laugh out loud at a statement like that. There is no TRUE or FALSE open source project in itself. There is simply only open source. There is no difference between Railo (once Railo goes open source) and OpenBD. By definition and nature of both projects the source is available to the public to view and modify. How they approach customers and how they sell services around these open source offering is different. But that in itself does not qualify for a “true” open source project. Or do you mean to say the Firefox project is not a true open source project? Or that only open source projects under LPGL are true open source projects?

But wait, there is still the license that OpenBD is using that we can go hostile about, right?

The license issue (or the misconceptions of it)

It is a common misconception to speak of something without understanding. Unfortunately, this is the case with people, including Mr. Bell, who think that a LPGL license is superior or “better” then the GPL license.

Of course, if you are a company, like Adobe, who wants to benefit from the efforts of another company (let’s better say from a competitor like Railo “was”) and in turn do not want to give back the changes then the LGPL comes in handy. In other words, the LGPL allows to take, but not give back. No wonder, that the so called “Community Experts” and Adobe embraces Railo and by that any company that releases code under LGPL.

That said, the LGPL stands in contrast to the original GPL that allows you to use the code, but if you change something to the code base to release the code under the GPL again. In other words, the GPL allows you to take, but demands that you give back.

Of course it is up to any open source project to decide on the license it wants to use and there is no need to differ on this point. Ultimately, the GPL has been used by many popular open source projects like MySQL, Linux, RedHat, JAVA and many others. This itself should speak more then any can argue.

It is sad to see that a genuine company and their so called “Community Experts” are not open to the efforts of a genuine open source project and are turning hostile against the efforts to give the CFML community a choice. By doing so, they create more confusion then helping.

At last, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. As Mr. Bell points out; “...I may simply be posting from ignorance.”, Not all hopes are lost.

Always wanted to help spreading open source? Today (June 17, 2008) is your chance. Download the new Firefox 3 release and help setting a new world record.

Head over to the dedicated Firefox Download Day 2008 website to find out more.

With all the buzz that has been going on since Scotch on the Rocks, you might be interested what the OpenBD Steering Committee has to say about Railo going open source, people leaving the Steering Committee and the relationship of the OpenBD open source project to New Atlanta.

Read the official statements over at the OpenBD Blog.

The third Firefox 3 Release Candidate is now available for download. It contains a single change for Mac OS X users only; there is no change for users running previous Firefox Release Candidate versions on Windows or Linux.

You can find out more about the new Features of Firefox 3 in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.

Testers can download the third Firefox 3 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 45 different languages.

Did we mention that we love the Mahalo search engine? Did we mention that we love the Mahalo daily even more? If you don't want to waste your time, but still want to talk about the new iPhone 3G and what Apple presented during the WWDC, then spend 60 seconds watching this.

All systems are go for the market launch of Firefox 3 for Windows and Linux but Mozilla plans another minor release candidate for the Mac OSX version due to plug-in hiccups introduced by Apple’s 10.5.3 update.

That’s the word from Mozilla’s Firefox group, which held today what may be final pre-release meeting for the much anticipated Firefox 3. The RC3 for Mac OSX 3 is being built and the update is expected to go live tomorrow, according to Mozilla. It does not appear likely that the glitch will hold up the mid month launch of Firefox 3. The open source product is the second leading web browser on the market next to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with almost 18 percent market share

Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg said Firefox 3 has recaptured the performance title and gave the browser a solid review.

Soon we will have Google Webkit integration in Open BlueDragon, the CFML open source engine. This is coming straight from Alan Williamson's blog:

"...have begun to integrate the GWT stack within Open BlueDragon to provide some of the handling of the new client side tags that have been introduced. By utilising Google we can be sure we won't have to keep recoding this area and it should be easier for people to contribute to if they want, especially, with some of the community GWT projects popping up.

...also looking at making CFML objects available to the GWT frontend by transparently marshalling it in and out as it moves from GWT to your CFC/CFML request. That way you don't need to mess around with JSON and try to work around some of the limitations that imposes...".

You can read the whole blog post over at his blog.

What a great conference Scotch on the Rocks 2008 was. I want to thank Andy Allan and his team for the great organization and taking care of everybody. I also want to thank all the great speakers for their time and the wisdom that they shared.

One of the highlights was the BoF session on OpenBD Wednesday evening. There is a great interest in this open source project and the feedback from the attendees was very positive (despite what some people want you to believe, make up your own mind). Here you can read everything that we have talked about.

Another highlight was the lunch (and the drinks at the bar(s) ) during the conference. Never have I attended a conference that served salad, main course and a desert in this manner. Well done!

Scotch on the Rocks 2008 R.I.P. ... can't wait for Scotch on the Rocks 2009.

Razuna, the Digital Asset Management with integrated Content Management System from SixSigns, will be ready to deploy on Railo 3.1 when available.

In this regard, Razuna will be ready to deploy on ColdFusion, BlueDragon, Open BlueDragon and Railo.

Razuna is a professional digital asset management/media asset management with an integrated web content management that delivers and makes management of your digital assets a simple task! By using Razuna you get the benefit of it being free and open source and supported by a professional company.

Razuna, previously a closed source system, will be released as open source in the coming weeks.

Railo, one alternative for ColdFusion (and there seams to be big interests in any alternative), has just announced at Scotch at the Rocks that they are joining JBoss.org and will release their new version 3.1 under LGPLv2 in October 2008.

I welcome this move as it gives us all another alternative to deploy CFML applications. I compliment Railo for joining JBoss.org and thus providing a professional platform that has a proven ground.

In about an hour I catch my flight to Edinburgh, Scotland, for the Scotch on the Rocks conference.

I will be giving a session on Friday about "Open BlueDragon, Tomcat & Compatibilities". This is a must attend for anybody interested in deploying Open BlueDragon and the major differences between Adobe ColdFusion and Open BlueDragon.

I will also have with me the latest version of Razuna - our open source Digital Asset Management with integrated Content Management. So, if you want to get a peak at it or want to talk to me about involvement, please ping me at nitai [at] sixsigns [dot] com.

See you in Scotland.

Our designer created a logo for our open source project "Razuna" today. We think it looks great and resembles what Razuna is all about. Here it is:

Since Razuna is a open source Digital Asset Management which can hold all your digital asset the "dots" on the left symbolize the assets that can be stored in the repository.

At the same time (just about right for the Scotch on the Rocks conference), we also put up the website for Razuna. Thus without further ado, we are happy to present to you the official home of the Razuna project.

VMware Fusion 1.1.3 is now generally available.

The new update addresses six issues, including:

• Boot Camp activation now works with Windows Vista SP1 Boot Camp partitions.
• VMware Fusion 1.1.3 again allows users to enable unbuffered I/O, otherwise known as "Optimize for Mac OS Application Performance," on Mac OS X 10.5.3 now that Apple has addressed a bug that previously caused a hang under heavy disk load when unbuffered I/O was in use.
• Fixes problem where sound would sometimes not work for VMs created with other VMware products including VMware Converter and VMware Workstation.
• Fixes a problem in VMware Fusion 1.1.2 that caused Shared Folder mounting failures in Linux guest operating systems.
• Fixes a problem where VMware Fusion did not distinguish between Traditional and Simplified Chinese so that if a system language preference was set to either Chinese version, Fusion would always present the Simplified Chinese interface.  In VMware Fusion 1.1.3, this has been resolved and Simplified Chinese is only displayed on systems set to Simplified Chinese by default.
• Updates the Simplified Chinese on-line help.

VMware Fusion 1.1.3 update is a FREE update for all existing VMware Fusion customers and the 1.1.3 update includes English, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese language support.

Apple finally released MacOS X 10.5.3 today. The update comes in at just around 200 MB and is available trough Software Update. The release notes show a lot of changes. Let's see if this update resolves a lot of hanging that a lot of people reported.

Alan Williamson just posted a great article on how to develop your own tags with the Plugin API of Open BlueDragon. Go create your own CFML language now...

The Open BlueDragon Steering Committee has asked me to join their ranks which I humbly accepted. If you are interested in what I have to say and would like to bring to the CFML open source community you are invited to read the interview I gave.

In that regard, I will hold a talk during the Scotch on the Rocks conference next week speaking about the "Differences between Adobe ColdFusion and Open BlueDragon, Tomcat and how to get you up and running with Open BlueDragon".

If you are at the conference come on over and say "hello" (I am a nice guy and won't bite).

Alan Williamson, father of BlueDragon, just posted a Plug-In API Overview for Open BlueDragon.

Now, this is very very powerful, to say the least. With it, developers are free to create plug-in without even touching the underlying code. Now, let's start the CFML plug-in fun.

... I just got back from watching the latest Indiana Jones movie called "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull". So, what do I think of it?

Well from the beginning on, you are reminded that this is a Indiana Jones movie. The hat sits at the right place, "Indy" looks "as always". The action is right and it is fun watching the movie. There are some jokes in it, not a lot, but just about enough. I think that Cate Blanchett is the perfect vilain (she looks good in every part of the movie). In the typical Indy manner the movie takes its turns, but...

The last 30 minutes of the movie, are simply put, a total waste of time and a disapointment. Why on earth, does Spielberg need to put in his "Alien freak show" (as he has done with all his last movies) in Indiana Jones? The whole thing that the 13 aliens combine into one and then destroys everything around it and flies back home in his mothership is just a very bad ending for the Indy series.

I get a lot of questions on this blog and a lot more per eMail on how to fine tune Tomcat and get it running together on Apache and other stuff. Since the release of Open BlueDragon, Tomcat is more apparent to a lot of CFML-Developers then ever.

I already posted an entry of how to get Tomcat running "behind" Apache and thus will focus here on the two configurations that helps the most.

Tomcat and memory

The number one issue I am seeing on the net is that a lot of users complain that Tomcat runs out of memory or pages are not being served properly. I have also seen a lot of posts where people are only posting snippets of codes but no real world examples of where to change values and how to (just read the FAQ about memory issues over at the official Tomcat site and you know what I mean). But actually it is so easy...

By default, Tomcat sets its own memory size at around 64MB which by far is not enough for web applications. You can set the "start size", the "maximum size" and you also need to up the heap space. to find out the proper values for your platform you will need to issue the command "java -X" in the terminal. For MacOS X 10.5.2 these parameters are:

-Xms<size>  set initial Java heap size
-Xmx<size>  set maximum Java heap size
-Xss<size>   set java thread stack size

Once you know your parameters you should allocate about 80% of your available Ram to Tomcat.

Open up your "catalina.sh" file (in the Tomcat installation folder under "conf") and add the following lines at the top of the file, but just underneath the comment section.

With the above settings I get the following Ram allocations under MacOS X.

Just about enough for any decent web application

Default settings in web.xml

The web.xml is the document that defines default values for ALL Web applications loaded into each instance of Tomcat. As each application is deployed, this file is processed, followed by the "/WEB-INF/web.xml" deployment descriptor from your own applications.

By default, Tomcat sets the "reload" and the "development" parameters to "true". The tricky thing is that these parameters can not be found anywhere as they are set by the server internally. Thus we need to ADD these two parameters and set them to "false".

Open your web.xml file (in the Tomcat installation folder under "conf") and add the two values to the "JSP" servlet container.

After you have done these two fundamental changes you should restart Tomcat. Watch how your applications behave and change the memory settings if needed.

Sadly the Service Pack 1 for Office 2008 brings a lot of installation problems. I myself suffered from the "Office Setup Assistant opens when I try to open an Office 2008 application" problem, and was going nuts for hours. But apparently there are more problems to be solved...

Despite the bad news that Office 2008 SP1 received, I do have to say that Office 2008 in general is a very good application and Entourage itself a very good eMail client. Anyhow, over at the Entourage Help Blog we can find solutions for the all the Installation errors so far.

In the comment section, about using Open BlueDragon with Tomcat, one user asked: "How do I get tomcat to serve my cfm pages from under an apache virtual server directory or is that not the right way. In other words how does one set up a virtual server running on port 80 if one has never used tomcat before?" I actually wanted to answer to him directly, but then thought I make it a blog entry on its own, since others might be interested as well.

What will follow is my setup with Apache and Tomcat.

1. Have Tomcat running on port 8080 (default).
2. Deploy the openbluedragon.war file.
3. Copy over the "bluedragon" and "WEB-INF" directories to your application.
4. Edit the server.xml file to add a host, like:

<Host name="openbd.local">
<Context path="" docBase="ABSOLUTEPATHTOYOURAPPLICATION"/>
</Host>

The docBase path can be the application you have already running on your website.

5. Restart Tomcat.

Now what you have to do is to forward any requests to openbd.local from Apache to Tomcat. Tomcat then serves the pages according to the docBase path. In Apache I have it setup like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName openbd.local
ProxyPass / http://openbd.local:8080/
ProxyPassreverse / http://openbd.local:8080/
HostnameLookups Off
</VirtualHost>

This works perfectly.

The only caveat with this is that each of my applications need a "WEB-INF" and a "bluedragon" folder. Making updating a "pain". But apparently, this is the best way to serve pages from a J2EE server. Each application has its configuration and you can only enable what you need for that particular application.

We just updated the Open BlueDragon image to hold the latest changes. These are:

• CVS access:
  As of 05/15/2008 the Open BlueDragon project has CVS access. This is now also enabled in this latest update of the image. CVS checkout has been done into the directory /var/lib/tomcat5/webapps/openbd. You can update the CVS Open BlueDragon now. "cd" into the directory and do a "cvs update" to retrieve the latest updates.
• The deployed "openbluedragon.war" file has been updated to the latest release (as of 05/15/2008).
• All CentOS 5.1 updates have been applied (as of 05/15/2008)

Due to the new release and change in size (1.1 GB) I had to make a new torrent file. Please update your trackers, seeding clients, etc. Thank you.

The VMWare image as well as the torrent (updated) can be download at the usual blog post.

The Microsoft Mac Unit released the Service Pack 1 for Office 2008 today. There is an official release paper available as well. You can download the 180 MB Update from Mactopia or wait until it appears on the Auto Update.

Things are taking place over at the Open BlueDragon space. Here are two important links for you to follow the development of Open BlueDragon:

Open BlueDragon Blog
Open BlueDragon Release Notes (this file gets updates automatically each time there is a new release)

Wow, since announcing the VMWare Open BlueDragon image only yesterday, we already experienced hundreds (!) of downloads

To keep the downloading sane (and also our server farm) we created a bit-torrent of the 1 GB image. One of our servers is always seeding the torrent so there will be at least one "seeder" always available. Still we ask anybody kindly to leave their bit torrent client open as long as possible.

Without further ado, here is the link to the Open BlueDragon torrent file.

PS: The image is now also listed at the VMWare Appliances Center.

We are happy to announce that we have made our Open BlueDragon VMWare image available.

The image contains;

CentOS 5.1 (with all available upgrades as of 05/11/2008)
Tomcat 5.5
MySQL 5.0.22
Apache 2.x
and of course Open BlueDragon (build of 05/11/2008)

The image can be run with VMWare Workstation for Windows, VMWare Fusion (for MacOS X), VMWare Server and VMWare ESX. For those that don't have any VMWare products installed, there is the VMWare Player available that let's you run the Open BlueDragon image on its own and completely for free.

Update on 05/15/2008:

We just updated the Open BlueDragon image to hold the latest changes. These are:

• CVS access:
  As of 05/15/2008 the Open BlueDragon project has CVS access. This is now also enabled in this latest update of the image. CVS checkout has been done into the directory /var/lib/tomcat5/webapps/openbd. You can update the CVS Open BlueDragon now. "cd" into the directory and do a "cvs update" to retrieve the latest updates.
• The deployed "openbluedragon.war" file has been updated to the latest release (as of 05/15/2008).
• All CentOS 5.1 updates have been applied (as of 05/15/2008)

Due to the new release and change in size (1.1 GB) I had to make a new torrent file. Please update your trackers, seeding clients, etc. Thank you.

There are two options to download the Open BlueDragon image that comes in at 1.1 GB:

Bit Torrent file (preferred) or
download it from our website.

This is a full blown setup, so you are able to deploy the setup for hosting or development. Tomcat runs on port 8080 (the default). Thus you can reach the Tomcat Administration at http://localhost:8080 and the default Open BlueDragon Installation at http://localhost:8080/openbluedragon or for the CVS deployment at http://localhost:8080/openbd/webapp/. Applications can be deployed right underneath these folders.

If you have any question or feedback lease post a comment. Happy CFML coding.

Just see what energy and movement can be behind open source. Less then a month ago New Atalanta released its very own CFML engine as open source, people start to get engaged.

Here is the Amazon Image of Open BlueDragon for everybody to use available.

The newest version of Sun’s xVM Virtualbox adds support for Apple’s OSX. The new version is dubbed Version 1.6 and was released during last week’s CommunityDays event.

This is the first open source virtualization to support the Mac, and while the support is not yet complete (you can only run OSX as a host, not a guest) it could become a real competitor to VMWare and Xen.

There are two versions, community and proprietary. Both are available as free downloads, but the latter is only free for personal use. The proprietary version also includes USB support and a Remote Display Protocol (RDP) server.

There is a lot of movement around the release of Open BlueDragon. It is good to see the community reacting positively to the open source endeavors of New Atlanta.

We, here at SixSigns, are currently testing our soon to be released open source Media Asset Management (MAM) with integrated Content Management called RAZUNA with the current release of Open BlueDragon.

As Razuna comes from our commercial product and that product stores every media asset in the Oracle 10G R2 database (future releases will support MySQL and other databases) it was one of the first tasks to get the Oracle database working with Open BlueDragon.

Open BlueDragon does not (yet) feature a full blown Admin section, so you will have to edit the XML file. But don't let it hold you back. It is simple to understand and easy to change things.

Anyhow to add the Oracle database to Open BlueDragon you have to do the following:

1. Download the appropriate JDBC Driver from Oracle (the ojdbc.14.jar) is just fine.
2. Place that file into the folder "WEB-INF/lib".
3. Edit the bluedragon.xml file (WEB-INF/bluedragon) and add the following lines. Make sure they are in the <cfquery> section;

<datasource name="oracle">
<name>myschema</name>
<logintimeout>120</logintimeout>
<databasename>myschema</databasename>
<initstring></initstring>
<connectionretries>0</connectionretries>
<connectiontimeout>120</connectiontimeout>
<username>myschema</username>
<sqlstoredprocedures>true</sqlstoredprocedures> <hoststring>jdbc:oracle:thin:@mydomain:1521:ORCL</hoststring> <sqlupdate>true</sqlupdate>
<perrequestconnections>true</perrequestconnections>
<drivername>oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver</drivername>
<sqlinsert>true</sqlinsert>
<sqldelete>true</sqldelete>
<password>mypassword</password>
<maxconnections>24</maxconnections>
<sqlselect>true</sqlselect>
</datasource>

Once done, save and restart Jetty, JBoss or Tomcat.

There is a updated version of Open BlueDragon available. The release covers the following fixes:

• Changed server product versions
• Updated Jetty ReadMe
• Tomcat temp directory fix

Now you have downloaded the Open BlueDragon Jetty Ready2Start package and read the Read-Me and you get errors trying to start it that looks like this:

sh-3.2# java -Mx512M -jar start.jar
Unrecognized option: -Mx512M
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

It looks like that MacOS X handles this a little bit different. Thus you will want to start it with the following commands:

java -jar -Xmx512M start.jar

Open Source ColdFusion (or let's say CFML) engine makes it debut today and is available for immediate download.

I suggest that you run, yes don't walk, over to http://www.openbluedragon.org/download.cfm and get your copy.

Currently, there is WAR Distribution, for dropping BlueDragon into Tomcat or any other J2EE server, available. There is also the Jetty available which is all setup to run on its own. EC2 and VMWare images will follow soon. Of course, there is also the source code available (I wonder how many Adobe employees will sneak some code and see how they can leverage it for CF 9...).

I have not seen any announcement about this, but I just went over to http://www.openbluedragon.org/ and saw this very well designed website.

Congrats to the designers. I like the design a lot. Now just waiting for the release

Just saw that Open BlueDragon will be released under GPLv3! In previous interviews, Vince stated that it will be v2. I welcome the change since we will release our Open Source Media Asset Management under v3 as well.

In case you are not aware of it yet, Coldplay will release their new album called "Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends" in June 2008.

Upfront to the official release of their new single "Violet Hill" they are offering a free download over at Coldplay.com. This is one week ahead of the conventional paid-for digital release and all for free!

Over at the crackberry.com they posted a very good comparison of the BlackBerry and the iPhone. This should help people to decide what device they ant to get. Note: This is a pro BlackBerry site so take some comments not to seriously.

On a side note: I have been using a BlackBerry for over a year now (first a 7xxx one and now a Curve) and I have to say I like the Curve a lot. Currently I am using a Nokia N95, wh