ColdFusion 8 Launch Event in New Zealand

ColdFusion 8 is being at the NZ CFUG meeting on 8 August, here in Auckland.
There are going to be a couple of presentations on the new features CF8.

One lucky person will win the grand prize — a CF8 license! All because s/he was there at the right place and at the right time.

For more details, head over to the CFUG site.

See you there!

ColdFusion-based sites in New Zealand

Recently the New Zealand ColdFusion user group (NZ CFUG) added a page in its Google Groups site listing various New Zealand website that use ColdFusion.

When I saw that, I was curious to find out how did they rank vis-a-vis each other in terms of number of pages of the sites listed in Google.

So I wrote a small ColdFusion application to shoot off to Google and find out the number of pages in any given site. (More on this app in another blog that I’ll be posting soon.)

I fed the application the list of all the 21 sites listed on the NZ CFUG site, and here are the results.

Number of pages indexed in Google for ColdFusion-based sites in New Zealand
Site
Pages
newzealand.com
390,000
Auckland University
159,000
New Zealand Herald
106,000
Massey University
55,000
Book a Bach
18,400
Sky Television
12,300
Foundation for Research, Science and Technology
11,100
Auckland Regional Council
7,220
Cuisine Magazine
6,150
Regency Duty Free
3,830
allblacks.com
3,070
Ministry of Education
1,210
ShadoCMS
976
Genesis Energy
555
rockcote.co.nz
350
altex.co.nz
206
skycity.co.nz
78
boatelectronics.co.nz
61
express-it.co.nz
25
polycut.co.nz
22
robinrive.com
5
redcross.org.nz
2
pizzahut.co.nz
1
emeasure.co.nz
1

The results were quite interesting.

  • newzealand.com is huge — 390,000 pages. They do have a lot of content, and the fact that the site runs in multiple language helps.
  • The sites for the two large universities in New Zealand — Auckland University (auckland.ac.nz) and for Massey University (massey.ac.nz) — also had quite a few pages indexed on Google. But of the two, Auckland University had almost triple the number of pages than Massey University.
  • New Zealand Herald is a large site for the New Zealand Herald newspaper. I would have thought that they would have more number of pages than 106,000. Being a newspaper, the site adds a ton of content everyday. But I guess they need to optimize their site for getting indexed into Google.
  • Of the NZ CF sites listed as of today on the NZ CFUG site, the three of the top four large sites seem to be running on ShadoCMS. Time for a disclosure — I work for Straker Interactive who develop ShadoCMS. But the intention of this blog is not to plug for ShadoCMS!
  • Book a Bach is a site for making online bookings for holiday homes in New Zealand. Obviously they have done things nicely and in Google friendly way.
  • The website for the Sky City group has less than 100 pages indexed on Google. And it is quite surprising given that the actual site seems to be quite large (runs on ShadoCMS as well).
  • Pizza Hut site is only listed once in Google. I guess they don’t need anything else as long as they get found by the search keywords “pizza hut new zealand”, which they do!

I’ll post updates on this blog as more CF sites are added the NZ CFUG site.

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that these are valid at the time of this blog entry and are based on the sites listed on the NZ CFUG site as of today. Also, this is based on one criteria only –number of pages indexed in Google for a site website URL.

Using SQuirrel SQL Client to connect to Apache Derby Database

Of late I’ve had to use Apache Derby in my work.

SQuirrel SQL is a great, Java-based client for connecting to any JDBC compliant database.
I recently did a couple of screencasts (at my place of work) on installing and setting up SQuirrel SQL to work with Derby.

Here are the links to the screencasts:
Installing SQuirrel SQL Client for Apache Derby
Set up SQuirrel SQL for Apache Derby Database

The Ultimate Conference for Rich Internet Technologies in August 2007

Straker Interactive (where I work) have just announced “Web on the Piste — The Ultimate Conference for Rich Internet Technologies”.

It will be held in Queenstown, New Zealand, 22-23rd August 2007. And will cover topics like Flex, Ajax, Spry and Flash.

Go to Web on the Piste (http://www.webonthepiste.com) site to find out more and register.

But the basic idea is to come have fun on the beautiful ski fields of Queenstown and learn about rich internet technologies.

I like the idea 🙂

I’ll be posting more this in the coming few weeks.

Instantiating a CFC in a directory with a period (.) in the directory name

The question is: how do you instantiate a ColdFusion Component (CFC) that exists in a directory which has a period (.) in the directory name.

The CFC I wanted to invoke lived at c:\webroot\components\2.1\math.cfc.

Instantiating it with the full package path “components.2.1.math“, threw an error.

I tried using “/” as well as square brackets in the package path, but both threw ColdFusion errors.

The answer was to create a ColdFusion Mapping (through the ColdFusion Administrator) to the folder in which the CFC lived.

So I created a mapping called “/version_2_1/” and pointed it to “c:\webroot\components\2.1\“. This way the full package page of the CFC was “version_2_1.math“. And this is a seen as a valid path by ColdFusion.

So life is sweet for now.

However, I’m still not sure what would one do if one didn’t have access to CF Administrator.

Do let me know if you know of any other way.