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You've Gotta Love Portability

I’ve been running all my sites and servers on Windows boxes for, well, since day one (make that CF1). About 3 months ago I brought a Linux box online (RedHat 8 running Apache 2.x), and somewhat nervously moved several of my lower volume sites (like http://www.cffaq.com/) over to it. Today marks 90 days of continuous uptime, and so this morning, on a whim, I moved the rest of my sites over, including http://www.forta.com/. First I moved over all the source code, next I defined my datasources, and then I tested the site – and it errored off right away. Seems that my Application.cfm was written so long ago (back in CF3 days) that it was named application.cfm (with a lower case A). So I renamed the file, run the compile script (to precompile all .cfm files), and tried again. And every single page (hundreds of them, tens of thousands of lines of code, some written as far back as CF2) worked as is. No difference whatsoever, other than the fact that everything runs faster (it is a much faster box, and pretty much dedicated). The old site is still up, I have to leave it up long enough for DNS to replicate, but not for much longer. Portability is a great thing, and an important ColdFusion advantage. Every once in a while it is good to be reminded of just how awesome ColdFusion is! 🙂 (Oh, if you do find any problems please let me know at ben@forta.com, thanks).

2 responses to “You've Gotta Love Portability”

  1. Ben Forta Avatar
    Ben Forta

    Ugh. First problem. Looks like there is a case-sensitivity issue in Custom Tag calls. Using <CF_> syntax CFMX could not find a mixed case .cfm file in the current directory. I renamed the file and edited the code to use <CFMODULE>, that fixed it.

  2. Matt Knight Avatar
    Matt Knight

    Ben, welcome to the wonderful world of Linux/Apache.
    While there are more things to consider when developing an application on this platform with this web server (like case sensativity) I feel it is supirior to the MS solution (not withstanding my hate for the "all things be MS" mentatlity).
    The performace is better vs. the MS option on the same hardware, and my Linux Admin can provide me with a wide range of options and configuration for Apache. I actually created a CF App that can create the custom configuration files for the virtural domains on our sever on the fly (writing the .conf files) Try that one with IIS!

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