Andrew Powell

Into The Mind of A Solutions Architect

Andrew Powell

Entries Tagged as Caching

My Google Code Site

March 12, 2008 · No Comments

After talking to Ben Stucki at 360|Flex, I decided that I should create a Google Code site for my code samples and preso posts. I am currently in the process of moving all my os code and preso samples into this repository for public consumption. Going forward, you will be able to find all my code samples there. It is released under the MIT License, which basically means, it's released "as is" and without warranty. Some things will be posted and never updated again. Other things will be updated and improved. There is no set schedule for projects to be updated, it's just a central point for you to find my code samples. My Google Code Site

→ No CommentsTags: Java · ColdFusion · Flex · Caching · General · Conferences · BlazeDS · Spry · JMS · ColdSpring · StockQuoter · Google · Spring · Adobe · Universal Mind · Hibernate · AIR · Hessian · XML · Speaking

Who Wants Some Free Cache?

November 20, 2007 · 6 Comments

Yes, I said cache, not cash. In my work with Hibernate, I've started using EHCache as my caching provider. It's small, it's lightweight, it's fast, and it's free. It's also totally written in Java, which is no sweat for us CF developers to implement, right? I wanted to try to use it in some of my ColdFusion applications, so I built a facade for it. The overall goal of this project is to make this powerful caching engine available to CF developers who do not want to get their hands dirty with Java code. So with that in mind, look for a lot of the complex functionality to be abstracted to a few methods to keep it simple. It wasn't too difficult to build this, seeing how easily ColdFusion plays with Java. The cache is fully configureable with xml files. You can define how many elements can go to memory, if it overflows to disk, etc. Pretty cool stuff. I've included the latest beta version of EHCache (1.4) and the required Java lib files. There is one catch though. It requires CF8 because the latest version of EHCache was compiled under JVM 1.5. There are full installation instructions included in the zip as well as a sample xml config file and the XSD document to validate against. This is just Prerelease 1 of this element. I am already working on a way to use EHCache's distributed cache. This means that you can easily share your caches across clusters with minimal configuration. Getting that nailed down is my main goal for Prerelease 2. Look for that sometime after Thanksgiving.

→ 6 CommentsTags: Java · ColdFusion · Caching · General · Adobe · Universal Mind · Hibernate

Introducing Kona Cache: Java-Powered ColdFusion Caching

September 06, 2007 · No Comments

I've been a big advocate of caching within ColdFusion, where needed, to help speed up performance. Until recently, I've been using CFCs to provide my caching mechanisms. i decided that I would try migrating a caching provider of mine to Java and see if it worked. Well, I dropped it right in, in place of the cfc, and the functionality was identical, yet faster, than the cfc provider.

[Read more →]

→ No CommentsTags: Java · ColdFusion · Caching

Spry :: IE Caching Issue

November 16, 2006 · 1 Comment

IE has a problem with caching the results of a XMLHttpRequest call. It will not acknowledge the useCache: false argument in the constructor of the Spry Dataset. You have to use these two steps: 1. Disallow caching in the header of the page that makes the Spry call, not the XML doc itself. <cfheader name="Cache-Control" value= "no-cache">
<cfheader name="Expires" value="0">
<cfheader name="Pragma" value="no-cache"> 2. Setup sometype of dynamic url for your XML. i.e. add the current datetime object to the end of your url as a parameter. <script type="text/javascript">
var ds1 = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet(null,null,{useCache:false});
function loadMyData()
{
var d = new Date();
ds1.setURL("http://myserver/myxml.xml?cacheBuster=" + d.now());
ds1.setXPath("root/element");
ds1.loadData()
}
</script>
<body onload="loadMyData()">
...
</body> This is a known bug with IE and can bite you if you have some dynamic data in Spry that needs to be reloaded at any interval.

→ 1 CommentTags: ColdFusion · Caching · Spry · AJAX

Spry and ColdFusion :: Improve Performance By Cutting Out ColdFusion

October 17, 2006 · 6 Comments

Ok, so maybe the title was a bit misleading. One side effect of having CF generate your XML files for Spry datasets is that every time a dataset is loaded or re-loaded, you're making a call to CF. This call to CF is eating up a processing thread, of which there are a limited number. On a high-traffic site, with a lot good number of Spry regions (in one case, dynamic drop downs), you can see ColdFusion's load actually increase b/c it is doing more work "behind the scenes" to build and deliver the XML files to the browser.

[Read more →]

→ 6 CommentsTags: Apache · ColdFusion · Caching · General · Spry · IIS · XML · AJAX

Webserver Peformance Tip :: Content Expiration

October 05, 2006 · 2 Comments

One of the fastest ways to speed up your web application is to enable content expiration on your web server. You do not want to do this for your CFM pages, but your CSS, images, JS files, and any other assets that do not change on a regular basis are all candidates for content expiration. When you set content expiration, the client will not even check for a new version of the file on the server until that asset's expiration date has passed. A good expiration period to use is 1 day. This will make all assets download the first time they are pulled, then not again for 24 hours.

[Read more →]

→ 2 CommentsTags: Apache · Caching · General · IIS

IIS Caching and Clustering :: eTag Fix

September 28, 2006 · No Comments

I was terribly vexed about a problem I was having on an IIS cluster. I had set content expiration on the images to a value way out in the future, but they were still being downloaded each time a page was requested. This was only happening in IE and not Firefox or Safari.

[Read more →]

→ No CommentsTags: Caching · General · IIS

On Deck: Caching and Mach-II

August 28, 2006 · 1 Comment

I am currently working on a project that will allow you to bypass pieces of business logic in either a cfc, a Mach-II listener or a Mach-II event and output the rendered content that has been cached. This evolved out of a re-tooling of SuperCache. Originally, it was only for use within CFCs, but I decided to worm it into Mach-II. Now, it is multifunctional, being able to be used within CFC's or within the Mach-II framework. I am putting the finishing polish on it and should have it out sometime soon.

→ 1 CommentTags: ColdFusion · Caching · Mach-II