Thoughts from the mountains

While reading the article titled, "Lessons from a lost decade: Developing for a disposable Web", I noticed the mention of ColdFusion at the end of the second paragraph. I found the article to be interesting and made valid points, but again I'm sad to see ColdFusion portrayed as a defunct language in the main stream tech media. Am I defensive or do others feel the same way?

For the last year or so, I had been using cfhttp and rssatom.cfc to read and parse rss feeds so that I could display the content on a site running on ColdFusion 7. I recently upgraded the server to ColdFusion 9, but shortly afterward started to receive the error, "An error occurred while Parsing an XML document. Content is not allowed in prolog". The error was not consistent, but occurred twenty to thirty times a day. I figured it was a good time to move to the more current cffeed tag that became available in ColdFusion 8 and see if it would resolve the issue.

Today, I had to create charts from percentage values stored as integers in a database. The idea was to create a bar or pie chart that would show the number of results in different ranges of percentages. The data was collected through a text input that allowed integer values between 0 and 100. I used the sql CASE operator select counts of the number of responses in each desired range.

I wanted to post an update to my post a few days ago about slow mail sending performance from my ColdFusion 9 server. To summarize my previous post, I was seeing much slower performance from my Cold Fusion 9 server when sending ".mail" files from the mail spool to my smto server. In the past, I had ColdFusion7 installed on the same box with Exchange 2003 and sent my bulk emails directly to the local mailserver. When I moved to a new server recently with ColdFusion 9, I started to send the mail to the old exchange server on the same network. The amount of time it took to send all of the messages from the spool to the email server dramatically increased. I switched my setup to include a local smtp server on the same box and used that smtp server to relay the mail to the exchange server and the speed dramatically increased and it now seem to be as fast as my old setup with the local smtp server.

We recently moved our site at work from CF7 to CF9 and I'm noticing a strange behavior when sending out bulk emails. If I send 500 emails at once they all quickly end up in the spool, but then they are actually leaving the spool for the mail server one at a time every one or two seconds. This is much different behavior than how the process was working on CF7. I have the Spool threshold set to 20 seconds on both the old and new servers but no matter what spool interval I set on the new CF9 server, it is processing one email at a time out of the spool.