Nialls Blog

When deploying applications to any 3rd party hosting provider or client, you may wish to consider protecting your development effort and intellectual properties (IP) by either encrypting or pre-compiling the application code.

In the attached document, I will briefly cover a number of ways in which you can accomplish this.

There are currently three methods of deploying your ColdFusion applications in an encrypted format, which ship with ColdFusion, so as to help protect your code:

   1. Encrypting templates using the “cfencode” utility.
   2. Pre-compiling and deploying templates as Java Byte code using the “cfcompile” utility.
   3. Deployment Packages as J2EE Archives (EAR or WAR files) – accomplished using the ColdFusion Administrator.

Another option is packaging your application in ColdFusion Archive Files (CAR), but this is not within the scope of this document as there is no compilation or encryption used with this method.

Further details can be found at: http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=deploying_3.html

The above options all have their own behaviours, pros and cons.  These are discussed in more detail below.

The document can be downloaded from here.

If anyone has anything to add, please feel free to contact me or comment below.

 

I came across these before but thought I'd share them out as they're pretty handy resources: DZone Check out the Cheatsheets too at RefCardz. There's one on getting started with ColdFusion 9.  

For ColdFusion, check out ColdFusion Portal.

Everyone knows how much of a pain it is to debug and test stuff in IE - especially for cross browser compatability and JS/AJAX errors or callbacks.

For development purposes - the following company provide a few nice solutions that could help with developing web applications in a number of versions of Internet Explorer.

DebugBar DebugBar: Is a toolbar which offers HTML DOM Tree view, HTTP and HTTPS Headers, page cookies view, HTML validation, JS Methods view, JS Execution etc. for Internet Explorer.

Companion.JS Companion.JS: Javascript debugger for IE - with detailed error reporting, Firebug like console logging, Javascript object inspection - enough said.

Last but not least...

IETester IETester: Allows for the rendering of web pages using the rendering and Javascript engines of IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows and Vista.

These are probably worth checking out as a solution to aid development and testing within Internet Explorer.

 

Microsoft (the King of browsers) have released the Beta of a new Cross Browser Compatability tool which allows you to compare different rendering engines - named "Expression Web SuperPreview".

As an alternative to having Virtual Machine software with different environments configured - or Multiple IE's installed, this looks, on paper, to be a sound solution.

Details can be found here: Expression Web SuperPreview.

I found this little trick on the blog of John Whish...which originally started at dopefly dot com.

There is a plugin for Firefox, which has recently been updated for the new Firefox 3, but for lesser browsers - this can make reloading your fusebox apps much easier!

To use it in Internet Explorer

Simply right-click this Full Fusebox Reload link and select "Add to favourites".

To use it in Firefox

Right click on this link Full Fusebox Reload and select "Bookmark this link".

To use it in Safari

Add a bookmark called "Full Fusebox Reload". Once you have created your bookmark, select "Show all bookmarks" from the "Bookmarks" menu and right click on "Full Fusebox Reload" which you have just created and select "Edit address". You need to paste in the following code:

javascript:window.location.href=window.location.href+(window.location.href.indexOf('?')==-1?'?':'&')+'fusebox.loadclean=true&fusebox.parseall=true&fusebox.password='+prompt('password','defaultpassword');

Changing the default password

To change the default password you can simply edit the url address you have for the bookmark and change the prompt('password','defaultpassword') part.

It is also worth noting that this is setup to parse all the files as well so you may want to edit that as well.