I am still wading through all of the new Scorpio/CF8 information. There is a lot of it and in order to get a better handle on all the topics and postings, I created a new Yahoo Pipe. The full URL is: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=4Awn2KYW3BG_hwQ5y6ky6g I picked the top 8 blogs for Scorpio news based on an unscientific cruise through the ColdFusion Yahoo Pipe from Brian Rinaldi.

Just a quick note to say I was able to get CF 8 working on a fresh install of Apache version 2.2.4. A few quick observations: During the CF install, I got a nice message reminding me to stop ColdFusion MX 7 Search Server After CF finished, I had to run the Web Server Configuration Tool again for everything to work I also had to open Port 51800 on my local firewall. I suspect this is JNDI. My initial impressions? The installation process handled the above issues gracefully.

Security is everyone's problem. It is important to be aware of issues that can foster security violations in software. Buffer Overflows, a common software security hole, arise from the length of input not being checked. When the input is larger than the memory allocated, the input data can spill over into unintended memory addresses. By appending a command with the correct offset, it is quite possible to push the command into memory space with high level privileges and execute.

While reading the latest on the very cool Trac-Fu project, by Russ Johnson, I was reminded about a tool I use to generate database scripts. I am a fan of most all Database platforms. I have used MSSQL 7/2000/2005, UDB, Oracle 8/9i/10g, MySql 4/5 and PostgreSQL 7.3/8.1 in production. When working in multiple database platforms, there inevitably comes the need to port a database from one platform to another.

I am in the process of doing maintenance on a Large Mach-II application written against the Mach-II 1.1.1 framework. Since the Mach-II team has been so busy upgrading and adding new features, I decided the upgrade was compelling enough and I would work through any incompatibilities or backwards compatibility bugs. To my delight, I haven't found a single issue with the upgrade.

While helping a user on IRC, (dalnet #ColdFusion) I was looking for the Var Scope Checker. In my hunt to find the darned thing, I saw in the comments of Matt Woodward's blog that Seth Petry-Johnson is planning on updating the Var Scope Checker. If you aren't familiar with the var scope checker, it is a tool that scours your source code looking for unscoped variables. It is a reasonably intelligent tool in the current incarnation. My only gripe with the tool is it isn't savvy in cfscript blocks.

While listening to the latest CF Weekly podcast, I heard Mark mention the Transfer Google Group was nearing 100 users. I got curious and went to check it out. The Transfer ORM list is well beyond 100 members. There are 117 members as of this posting. Since I was number 10, I feel especially proud! If you use Transfer, or are interested in using Transfer ORM, join the group. It is definately a no-fluff list. The most recent topic was a call for review on the new Compound Key Specification.

The LightWire presentation by Peter Bell has just finished. Great job by Peter explaining the inner workings of the frameworks, the benefits of his approach and some of his philosophies. Also a great job to Nick for getting everything started on time, collating the questions, finishing on time and for being so quick with URLs during the show. I find these presentations put on by Nick, Kola and the cfframeworks crew to be a boon for learning and for the community as a whole.

One of the proper jewels of ColdFusion is the dynamic nature of the language. There is nothing I love more than replacing tons of boilerplate code with a few lines of dynamic CF! One language feature that could be improved is the ability to dynamically call a method on a component. I find CFInvoke a bit unwieldy, syntactically annoying, and in my humble opinion, unnecessary.

Recently on the Dalnet #Mach-II IRC channel, a user asked about including resources in a mach-II.xml file. As you probably know, the MVC Framework, Mach-II, recently added an include feature. This is an excellent feature to help break up large XML file, which has been one of my previous annoyances with Mach-II. The way the new include feature works is inside an 'includes' tag define a resource to include. Note, the extra space I added in the xml tags.