I recently needed to create some ColdFusion code to call into Zillow so I thought it would be worth sharing.

The first thing you will need is an ID from Zillow to give you access to the http services. They use the term web services but they are really http services. You can find out everything you need to know about getting started and the Zillow APIs here: Getting Started with Zillow

Once you have your ID you can enter it into the below code and test it on your site.

I posted a demo here: DEMO

Often times we get cases where we need the complete stack trace of an error and not what is reported by any custom error handler template.

Here is a great way to track your errors that also allows inspection of the entire cfcatch structure at a later time, without interfering with any custom templates.

In the above code I create a missing template exception, then have the cfcatch simply use cfdocument with a unique filename, to dump out the cfcatch to a PDF file.

You can adjust the location etc as you see fit of course.

The result is a PDF for every occurence showing the complete error and hopefully allowing you to quickly get to a resoluiton.

I needed to have a user easily enter a latitude and longitude where there might not be a true address, so I created a simple script to populate form variables when a user doubleclicks a Google Map.

The below is just javascript and html which uses the Google Map API V2 to place a map on the page which by default centers the map when you doubleclick.

The function that is fired in a dblclick event will then set the 2 form variables and leave a marker behind to help the user know where they clicked.

You will need to change the center points and the form names, but all this could be dynamically set as well.

Hope you can use this in your apps.

Note: you will need to fix the 2 InvalidTag's with script.

In writing a map application with ColdFusion I needed to create some custom icons and discovered an easy way to take any small icon and create hundreds of them with sequential numbers overlayed on top of the icon.

There are a number of sites with free icons, but they all seem to stop at 99, I needed to go into the hundreds in some cases, which made me start to look at what cfimage can do for me.

First, I went I downloaded a default Google icon as my base (20x34px), then I created new blank icons with differing colors within Photoshop. I saved all the blank icons in a directory called /icons off my root directory. Once I have all the blanks I then edit the list in the below script.

The script will create a directory for each color, so for blue you will have /icons/blue/mapicon1.png thru mapicon99.png or however you create.

I think you could move the ImageNew out of the loop and into a variable but it works as written and is a one time conversion.

My next idea is to have user generated icons, by having the users select the background and text color.

I also want to create multiple lists to change the text color, since some backgrounds need black text.

This should be enough to get you started. Enjoy.

Just wanted to pass along some notes from doing a ColdFusion 8 upgrade to ColdFuison 9 64 bit JBoss install on RedHat this week.

First off, all went fairly well, but I think you might find the tips below helpful.

First get all the software:
- CF 9 Linux 64 bit
- CF 901 Updater 64 bit
- CF 9 Cumulative Hot Fix (optional)

The ColdFusion Installation docs are what we generally followed:
Deploying ColdFusion 9 on JBoss Application Server
You can get the Updater and the Hot Fixes following the below links:
ColdFusion Updaters
ColdFusion 901 Cumulative HotFix 1

Install CF9 using the J2EE install option.

Once installed you are left with the decision to test the install, which would put you down the road of expanding the ear and war per the instructions. However, the 901 updater executable requires you to apply it to an archived war file. So, you might want to apply the updater before expanding the ear and war and moving the resulting ear directory into JBoss's deploy directory.

We did not know the CF 9.01 updater required an archive, and we had already deleted the war file, so we had to recreate the war, apply the updater, re-exand and swap out the new war with the old war directory. So, just keep that in mind if your doing a complete install as we were doing.

Here are the complete docs for installing the CF 9.01 Updater:
Installing ColdFusion 9.01

Updating your Settings from ColdFusion 8 to ColdFusion 9
So to move the settings we followed the instructions inside the link below:
Migrating ColdFusion Settings for J2EE installations

So by following the above we did the following:
- copied all the neo-* files from ../web-inf/cfusion/lib out of the 8 install, and placed then in the ../web-inf/cfusion/lib/cf8settings directory inside 9
- adjusted the runmigrationwizard and the migratecf8 settings in ColdFusion 9 cfusion/lib/adminconfig.xml, change them to true
- restarted ColdFusion and entered the Admin to trigger the Migration

All the ColdFusion 8 settings were brought over. The migration wizard allows you to filter out settings if you don't necessarily want them all.

That was it, all went well, and all the settings were brought over and all datasources connected.

If you want your code to work across multiple domains when using Google Maps you will need to dynamically change your Google Maps key based on request. Google requires you have a unique key for each host that makes calls into Google.

I solved this by placing a few statements in my application.cfc onrequest function.

The code checks the cgi.http_host and then sets the correct key value.

I created the all the keys at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

If you just have one host you can alternatively set the key inside the administrator.

As MAX unfolded this year you could feel a major shift across all products to developing apps for all screen sizes. This was not the year of the big release but a year to recognize the shift that is occurring to have all new applications consider all devices from browsers, phones, tablets, and TV consoles. I don't think it was just a coincidence we received free devices, in fact it underlines the transition we are all going through as we write applications for all devices.

It kind of feels like 1997 when everyone became aware the internet was going to overtake the majority of application development. You get that same feeling when you look out over the next 2-3 years when you look at convergence of apps across devices and the move into the family room. (In a strange connection, it's hard to believe the same guy who hit the game winner in game 7 in 1997 is the same guy who hit it in 2010.)

To best capture this evolution all you need to do is watch the opening video of MAX as Kevin Lynch walks thru some timeline charts that demonstrate the changes upon us with bandwidth, browser vs devices, screen size changes ,digital publishing and the now the family room.

MAX Opens with Multi-Screen Revolution

Throughout the conference we witnesed how products are adding features to support managing screen sizes. ColdFusion did a sneak peek around supporting multi-screens with setting up a scope which will carry the clients device meta data using the CS5 Device Central database. Dreamweaver is adding more support around using CSS versions to support differing layouts based on device.

One big announcement was the Flash Builder 'Burrito' Labs release which is now available to everyone inside http://labs.adobe.com . I'd encourage you to download and check out how easy it is to start writing Mobile applications.

Here is a great alert to keep on all the time or when you are trying to capture long running requests. The snapshot will then capture the running thread and make it easy to identify where the thread is with processing the request. Usually you can find the exact line number within the ColdFusion tag.

The below code will turn on monitoring and then set UnresponsiveServerAlert to create a snapshot anytime 1 or more requests goes over 5 seconds.

You can change any these settings including seting up notifications. You can set this up via the ColdFusion Administrator, but you might find it easier to setup alerts via script if you have a number of servers.

A quick block of code to demonstrate how to generate a stack trace from within ColdFusion. Using the server monitor API it is a fairly simple process.

The code calls the login function passing in your ColdFusion Admin password in order to get access to the Admin API.

The dumpSnapShot function will create the stack trace and return the file path of the snapshot. The default location is usually ../web-inf/cfusion/logs/snapshots.

You might want to prompt for a password versus hardcoding in the tag as well.