The Byte Stops Here

CGI Facade?! I'm sure you are saying, I've heard of a Session Facade, but why a CGI Facade...

Well, simple really. Web Servers are evolving, and sooner or later, you'll put a device or a server in between you firewall and your web server, like a clustering device or a reverse proxy like my current favorite, NGINX (see previous post for details).

NGINX, for example, will accept http requests on port 80, and forward them to your web server. In doing so, the web server thinks the request is coming from NGINX and not from the outside world. Your CGI vars, notably REMOTE_ADDR and REMOTE_HOST will get skewed with the IP of NGINX. A lot of times you will run NGINX on the same physical server and the CGI variables will start displaying 127.0.0.1.

This can be a problem. For example, you may be using the IP for logging, or for configuration based on the dev environment. ColdFusion is not smart enough to know who the original requester is. But its only partially at fault.

When NGINX gets the request, as you'll see from sample configs, it DOES pass who the original requester is. It creates new HTTP headers and passes them off to the web server. Here are two lines, see if you can follow:

proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP       $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded_For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

As you can see, its adding two headers: "X-Real-IP" and "X-Forwarded_For" with the IP of the requester. In your CGI Facade, you don't want to rely on REMOTE_ADDR and REMOTE_HOST, and instead, if the header has these values, pass them instead for whatever use case you may have. In face I would recommend you do that now so as to future proof your apps.

This is not a new problem. Many people are familiar with SQUID, and that too sets headers as it proxies. So get to it!

Pretty interesting stuff. Read more @ http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=262655797130.

Did you know that you can easily download Youtube with little or almost no effort on your part? And no, its not with a browser plugin, or anything else thats complicated.

Actually - its a simple as changing the URL.

If you like a Youtube video, change the URL from youtube.com to 3outube.com. That's right, just change the Y to a 3.

Alternatively, you can add the word "kiss" in front of Youtube.com as well. Both website allow you download FLVs, and 3outube offers MP4s as well.

Easy to remember, easy to use.

I was just informed I didn't make it to the group this year. As you know, its been renamed as the Adobe Community Professionals.

The group is limited to 30 professionals every year, and I believe Adobe wanted to bring fresh faces to the group. As you know, I'm an oldie.

Its OK. I'll live. And continue to give back to the community as best I can.

Over the past year, I've had increasing management responsibilities. I'm currently the Director of Product Management at a SaaS company whose products suite is built using ColdFusion. This gives me a unique viewpoint on ColdFusion, and I'll continue to voice that.

Throughout 2009, I've been reviewing books before publication (very exciting!), reviewing POSS service offerings, writing more open source code, and beta-testing (pre-release) Adobe software.

Lets see where 2010 takes me!

Does anyone have any experience working with NetSuite by using ColdFusion?

I was wondering what sort of stories you can share - the good and the bad.

Just saw this. MSSQLTips.com was asked: "Is Microsoft SQL Server superior to MySQL or not? What are the pros and cons of using SQL Server over MySQL? Is MySQL mature enough to compete with a big player like Microsoft and Oracle? Can we fairly compare both products?"

Read their answer @ http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1920&ctc.

Saw this, and it looks pretty impressive.

Read more and see demos @ http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/.

I hope ColdFusion Builder can take advantage of this!

Read more @ http://www.extjs.com/blog/2009/12/17/ext-js-3-1-massive-memory-improvements-treegrid-and-more%E2%80%A6/

Just an FYI. I ran CFQueryParam Scanner (latest from RiaForge) on my local CF9 box, and got this error:

Invalid name for user-defined function.
The name Variables.Struct contains illegal characters.
The CFML compiler was processing:
* A cffunction tag beginning on line 4, column 2.
The error occurred in \qpscanner\index.cfm: line 4

I changed the function named "Variables.Struct" to "Variables_Struct" and ran it to get this error:
Variable STRUCT is undefined.
The error occurred in \qpscanner\index.cfm: line 16

This is directly in competition to a service like OpenDNS, which has a lot of value-add. Public DNS seems bare bones, and is based on proprietary DNS software. In the FAQ, when asked if they used BIND, they said: "No. Google Public DNS is Google's own implementation of the DNS standards." Looks like the war to get a faster, better experience surfing and resolution experience and overcome some of the archaic legacy DNS issues has finally begun! Woo-hoo!

Read more @ http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/.

Download today!

More details @ http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/529/cpsid_52915.html.

Now you can supposedly move your VM from server to server, server to client. Sweet!

More details @ http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog.

That's right. Now you can intergrate your apps with LinkedIn. See the blog entry for more details @ http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/23/linkedin-platform-launch/. I wonder who will write the first RiaForge Project!

A very promising framework modeled on Ruby on Rails has finally hit Version 1.0.

Find out more @ http://cfwheels.org/.

In case you haven't seen this already. (Trying to motivate folks to keep innovating!)