I just recently installed beta 3 of Oracle Express and was amazed with it. I have been doing Oracle development alongside ColdFusion for about 6 years now. Oracle is not an easy puppy to install and configure, especially under Linux or any Unix flavor. However, in windows, although performance lacking, but installation heaven.

Oracle release the production version of XE on Feb 24 and I should be trying to upgrade to it this week.

Screenshots

As for the beta 3 here is my mini-review:

With Oracle Database XE, you can now develop and deploy applications with a powerful, proven, industry-leading infrastructure, and then upgrade when necessary without costly and complex migrations.

Oracle Database XE can be installed on any size host machine with any number of CPUs, but this free version of the world's leading database will store up to 4GB of user data, use up to 1GB of memory, and use one CPU on the host machine.

The installer is pretty straightforward and easy to setup. The only weird thing I experienced was that I was unable to connect to other databases I had setup on my 10g Client install. Since XE replaces the system paths, everything looks at this new Oracle Home. So I basically had to move all my entries on my tnsnames.ora to the one in the XE directory. Simple and logical.

Apart from that little glitch, the database purrs!! I was connected to it through Toad, Coldfusion, DB Solo, and Aqua Data Studio with no problems. The database web tool is extremely intuiative and easy to use.

This database is a great starter database if you haven't messed in the Oracle World. Every feature is there as far as I can see, except well the 4gb of data limitation.

Here is a great blog by Tug, who has created a viewlet that shows you how easy it is to install this wonderful database.

• Tug's Blog installation viewlet
• Oracle XE home
• Oracle XE Download Page

 

This is a recorded bug that is solved by the CFMX7 cumulative hot fix 2. However, the bug is still active only on MAC OS X standalone flash player or projector.

Thanks to Dave Stanten at Adobe, for sending me the technote and resolving this issue: Tech Note

ColdFusion MX 7 Gateway Connection URL

If you are using Flash Remoting to access ColdFusion code, you may run into an issue where ColdFusion constructs an invalid URL when appending a jsessionid. If this occurs, the web server that is accessing your code could throw errors. The solution is to simply add a question mark (?) to the end of the gateway URL. Change /flashservices/gateway to /flashservices/gateway?. This ensures that the URL is created correctly.

I only had this problem with flash player 8 and 7 for the MAC, but standalone only. If I used the flash player plugin within a browser I was ok or if I used any form of the flash player on Windows.

Also, the tricky part is that the Coldfusion logs report the following, which is due to the malformed URL's:

[Flash Remoting MX]->Request received was not Flash-based (not of the binary AMF protocol)

So lookout for this tricky bug if you come upon it. A single character can make a difference. :)

Happy Remoting!!!

Here is a little tricky bug on CFMX 7 dealing with web services and our favorite buddies, Coldfusion Mappings. 100% reproducible and I think Macromedia had a fix for 6.1, but not for 7, at least I don't know about it.

Here is what it comes down to. Let's say you have a CFC on your server on the following physical location:

/data/cfcs/remotes/giftshop/products.cfc

And the apache or IIS web root points to "remotes", thus, to call this webservice wsdl you would use

http://myurl/giftshop/products.cfc?wsdl

Now let's say that you have a CFMX mapping to any directory, it actually doesn't matter, but with the name "giftshop".

When you go now to the wsdl URL you get this nasty error:

AXIS error

Sorry, something seems to have gone wrong... here are the details:

Fault - Error attempting to create Java skeleton for CFC web service; nested exception is:

coldfusion.xml.rpc.CFCInvocationException: [coldfusion.xml.rpc.SkeletonClassLoader$UnresolvedCFCDataTypeException : Could not resolve CFC datatype: /giftshop/webProducts.cfc]

AxisFault

faultCode: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Server.generalException

faultSubcode:

faultString: Error attempting to create Java skeleton for CFC web service; nested exception is:

coldfusion.xml.rpc.CFCInvocationException: [coldfusion.xml.rpc.SkeletonClassLoader$UnresolvedCFCDataTypeException : Could not resolve CFC datatype: /giftshop/webProducts.cfc]

faultActor:

faultNode:

faultDetail:

{http://xml.apache.org/axis/}hostname:ibm-1.sandals.com

The problem lies that CFMX confuses the webroot path with the coldfusion mapping, it can't distinguish between them and actually follows the mapping. Once you remove or rename the CFMX mapping, the error disappears and you have a wsdl compilation.

Does anybody now if a fix is on the way? or already out? Please let me know.