ColdFusion 8 : Changes with File Upload

Till ColdFusion 7, it was not possible to upload a large file. The server could not handle uploading a file of probably anything more than 300-400 MB. And on top of that, if there are multiple people trying to upload large files simultaneously to the server, only thing that you can do is to pray :-)

You might wonder and I agree with you, that its a huge limitation. So why was it this way ? Well.. that was because the server had to keep the entire uploaded file in the memory. Whoa.. Why the heck does the server need to keep the entire uploaded file in memory? - For a single reason of serving the function GetHttpRequestData(). As you know, this function returns a 'struct' containing the metadata for the Http request that comes to the server. Since this struct also includes request body, and the uploaded file is part of the request, the file has to be retained in the memory in order to honor this function.

With ColdFusion 8, we have removed the limitation on file upload size. So now you can upload files of any size without causing any issue with the server. I have successfully tried with 5 GB file because that was the biggest I could get hold of but you can absolutely upload files of any size. ColdFusion nicely handles it, reads it the way it should without requiring much memory.

But hey, hold on a sec.. What about the function GetHttpRequestData()? Wasn't that the reason for this limitation in the first place? Well, the function GetHttpRequestData() works perfectly fine except in this one case - In the multipart request, i.e; request in which a file is uploaded - "content" in the returned struct will be empty. If you need to get the uploaded file content in memory, you can always read the uploaded file and keep it in memory. So that should not be much we are asking for. Are we?

If in case, you absolutely want the content from GetHttpRequestData() and file upload size is of no concern to you, we allow you to revert back to ColdFusion 7 behaviour. All you need to do for this is to set the Java system property "coldfusion.markResetForMultiPart" to "true" and you are back to the old behavior.

Unlimited aliases with Gmail and SPAM protection

Though this hack in Gmail has been known for a while, I read about it today and found it interesting enough to share it. As Amit decribes in his post, GMAIL lets you create unlimited number of aliases for your gmail id and you can then give these aliases on other websites without worrying about spams. The trick is to use '+' addressing!

As he says, gmail ignores anything between '+' and '@' in the email address. So a mail sent to paris.hilton+model@gmail.com or paris.hilton+celebrity@gmail.com will all go to paris.hilton@gmail.com. In the received mail, "To" will still point to the original id to which it was sent which makes it easy to create spam filters based on the 'To' address. If used intelligently, you also get to know which site leaks your address and creates SPAM. So, if I have to give my mail id to any website xyz.com, I can give 'mymailid+xyz@gmail.com'. If I get the spam with 'to' address as mymailid+xyz@gmail.com, I get to know that its xyz.com that had leaked the id and creates spam.  Pretty cool..

ColdFusion and WebService : "class file has wrong version"

I can't even count the number of times I have seen this error while QA folks were running webservices regressions for ColdFusion 8. Everytime, someone was running webservices tests on a J2EE configuration they used to get an error :

coldfusion.jsp.CompilationFailedException: Errors reported by Java compiler:
....
class file has wrong version 49.0, should be 48.0

I saw the same error posted in the public forum where the user had deployed ColdFusion 8 on JRun with JDK1.5 and was trying to invoke webservice. And hence this blog entry :-)

This error comes because of incompatibility between the tools.jar and the JVM version. ColdFusion 8 ships Java 1.6's tools.jar (you will find it in cfusion/lib) which is of course incompatible with any other JDK/JRE version. You will see the same behavior with ColdFusion 7 as well, if you run it on a JVM other than 1.4. So the rule of thumb is - if ColdFusion is running on a JVM version other than the shipped one, you must ensure that the tools.jar is in synch. In short, you will need to copy JDK's tools.jar to cfusion/lib.

Using CFFeed with URL sending compressed content

Today someone posted on ColdFusion forum regarding this problem where cffeed was not able to handle a particular URL and it was throwing an error. The URL which he tried was http://movies.msn.com/rss/topcelebs and it failed with an error

"Unable to read the source URL.
unknown compression method"

The reason it happens is - The URL returns the response in gzip compressed format only. So when ColdFusion sent a request to this URL and asked for uncompressed data, it could not get anything and hence it was unable to read it. A simpe workaround for this is to use cfhttp to fetch the content, write to a temporary file and then use the cffeed tag to read this file. Important thing to keep in mind here is to set an additional header in the cfhttp tag using cfhttpparam to indicate that it can accept compressed data as well.

Here is the modified code where it first tries cffeed with the URL. If that fails, then it tries to use cfhttp to fetch the content and writes to a temporary file and then uses it in cffeed.

<cfset tempDir=GetTempDirectory()>
<cfset tempFile = GetTempFile(tempDir, "myfeed")>
<cfset tempFileName = GetFileInfo(tempFile).name>
<cftry>
    <cffeed action="read" source="http://movies.msn.com/rss/topcelebs" name="feedInStruct" >
<cfcatch any>
    <cfhttp url="http://movies.msn.com/rss/topcelebs" path="#tempDir#" file="#tempFileName#">
        <cfhttpparam type="header" name="Accept-Encoding" value="compress,gzip,deflate">
    </cfhttp>
    <cffeed action="read" source="#tempFile#" name="feedInStruct" >
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
<cfif FileExists(tempFile)>
    <cfset FileDelete(tempFile)>
</cfif>

<cfdump var="#feedInStruct#">

ColdFusion 8 : IsInstanceOf

If you use lot of CFC inside your ColdFusion application, I am sure you would have come across a situation where you would need to know whether the object is an instance of a particular CFC. This is specially needed when you have components extending other component or you are passing the objects around. ColdFusion 8 introduces a new function IsInstanceOf to do exactly the same. It becomes even more useful after we have interfaces in ColdFusion. And the icing on the cake is that it works even with java objects which means that you can use this function to find out if a particular object is of a particular java class type.

Here is how the function looks.

IsInstanceOf(object, typeName)

where typeName is name of the component/Interface or fully qualified java class name.

It returns 'true' if

• The object passed is an instance of a component which is same as specified type or inherits it or implements the specified interface. Just to be clear, a component 'A' inherits a component 'B' if A or any of its super component extends 'B'. Similarly a Component 'A' implements an interface 'B' if A or any of its super component, implements interface 'B' or any of the interface that 'A' or its parents implement, extends from the specified interface.
  
• The object passed is an instance of a java class (created using cfobject or createObject for java class) which is same as specified class name or inherits the specified class name or implements the specified interface.

Here is an example

Intf.cfc

<cfinterface>
<cffunction name = "foo">
</cffunction>
</cfinterface>

Comp.cfc

<cfcomponent implements="Intf">
<cffunction name = "foo">
   <cfoutput>In method foo</cfoutput>
</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

test.cfm

<cfset obj = CreateObject("Component", "Comp")>
<!--- Create a Java object --->
<cfset javaObj = CreateObject("java", "java.lang.StringBuffer")>

<cfoutput>object is of type Comp : #IsInstanceOf(obj, "Comp")#</cfoutput><br>
<cfoutput>object is of type Intf : #IsInstanceOf(obj, "Intf")#</cfoutput><br>
<cfoutput>java object is of type String : #IsInstanceOf(javaobj, "java.lang.String")#</cfoutput><br>
<cfoutput>java object is of type StringBuffer : #IsInstanceOf(javaobj, "java.lang.StringBuffer")#</cfoutput><br>

Printers harmful to health..

I am not kidding. There was a recent study done by Queensland University of Technology, Australia which said that printers are hazardous and can cause sever illness including cancer ! Check out the report here.

ColdFusion 8 performance whitepaper

I am glad to see the ColdFusion community so excited with CF 8 performance. We got very encouraging response regarding the performance in our pre-release forums and we are thankful to everyone who gave such invaluable feedbacks. Though people started seeing a very good performance gain in their application on ColdFusion 8, we never talked about the performance benchmark numbers until CFUnited 2007, where Ben showed the performance numbers for ColdFusion 8. No wonder this is the #1reason in Top 8 reasons why you want ColdFusion 8 :-).

Extracting performance up to this extent was not an easy task. We analyzed nearly 2.4 million lines of real life CF application code, to zero-in on the most commonly used tags and functions. Main challenge was after that - analyze the generated java code for all the tags, change the compiler to generate more optimized code, run it through profiler and optimize CF engine for each of the tags and functions and their various combinations. And this went on and on in many many iterations. Overall it was real fun :-)

I still remember the most exciting moment when I ran the load test for CFC, after I had made some code changes, and the result was freaking unbelievable. It looked too good to be true and I was literally running around with the code changes to run it on other machines and verify it . That one small change gave nearly 6x gain :-). It is not that the CF7 code was inefficient or poorly written. It was only matter of extracting juices as much as possible and putting some smart intelligence.

Check out the ColdFusion 8 performance whitepaper which talks in much detail about the performance numbers for different areas, the methodology used for benchmarking etc. Manju Kiran, who was my QA-buddy for most of the features I worked on, did a tremendous job in setting up and running the benchmark and creating the meat of this wonderful document (and of course keeping me on toes).