I’m using the following:

http://www.wordpress.org
http://www.shopplugin.net
http://www.mediatemple.net
http://curl.haxx.se/

So first off, I had an issue where the FirstData plugin built by Shopp was pointing to the incorrect URL:

var $url = “https://secure.linkpt.net/lpcentral/servlet/lppay”;

This url is actually FirstData’s ‘Connect’ url… which is a forms based api… but the Shopp Plugin FirstData gateway plugin actually uses FirstData’s ‘Global Gateway Api’, but this is not the URL that they are using … When I called FirstData and gave them that URL, they assumed that I was using the ‘Connect’ product and proceeded to set me up with that on their side. This resulted in a bit of a monkey race for me until I looked further at what the Shopp FirstData gateway plugin was actually doing. When I realized that it was passing XML on port 1129 to FirstData, I knew then that it was not following the ‘Connect’ pattern, but rather was following the model setup for the ‘Global Gateway API’.

When I changed the URL string to the following:

var $url = “https://secure.linkpt.net/”;

I was now getting a ‘timeout’ error rather than an HTML page for a return from cUrl.

cUrl allows you to set some options to manage timeout issues … so I tried them:

curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 4);
curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);

After some digging in the log files, I found that cUrl was attempting the connection on port 443, when FirstData actually requires port 1129. Shopp’s FirstData gateway plugin uses the following curl_setopt() to set the port:

curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_PORT, 1129);

Unfortunately, MediaTemple does not appear to accept this…because cUrl’s default 443 port was what was showing in the logs.

So… I modified the URL string:

var $url = “https://secure.linkpt.net:1129

and commented out the curl_setopt:

// curl_setopt($connection, CURLOPT_PORT, 1129);

This resolved all my issues, and the cart began processing orders.

My initial complaint here is with Shopp’s FirstData gateway plugin… having the URL string for FirstData’s ‘Connect’ product is a bit misleading… and completely incorrect… it does not work with the approach that the plugin was taking, as it was actually built to use the ‘Global Gateway API’. I wasted a lot of time going down the wrong road here because of this. My second complaint is with FirstData … as I had shown them the plugin, and they responded by setting me up with ‘Connect’ … making the same assumption that I had about the URL string… but not looking any further into what the plugin was trying to do. My third complaint is that MediaTemple does not seem to support the use of curl_setopt() … at least not for setting the port that cUrl runs on.

Hopefully this helps someone else save a bit of time. It was a bugger for me.

I must confess that I’m writing this from the perspective of a guy who has invested a lot of time into a specific technology, and is now having a difficult time getting work in that specialization. So take what I’m about to say from that context.

Perhaps a bit idealistic of me here, but why don’t more companies focus on forming great teams with the people that they hire rather than focusing only on hiring for a specific tool? Do you hire the carpenter, or do you hire Ryobi, Craftsman, Stanley, and Makita? Maybe it’s a symptom of the ‘keyword frenzy’ … this long list of acronyms that recruiters and hiring managers are tasked with attaching to the jobs they have open. Maybe they think it is more difficult than it really is for a good developer to transition from one language to another.

I would think it would make sense to hire someone on your team who is a strong Sr. level developer in one technology as a Jr. level developer in another and then train them the way that you want them to be trained. This spirit of ‘Apprenticeship’ is surprisingly lacking in this field, particularly considering the open source movement. I would totally be willing to take a pay cut for 6 months to a year if it meant working on a team with a technology that I haven’t used before, or one that I wanted to gain more confidence in.

I know what you’re going to say… why not hire BOTH for great teams AND the tools you need? And you might be right… but let’s say that it takes an otherwise good developer 3 months to ‘ramp up’ with a specific technology. Now you have a guy who is essentially a Sr. level developer with strong OO abilities working in a Jr. level position for at least another 9 months. They are happy to be working, learning something new, adding to their toolbox… and so long as you are able to promote them as a Sr. within a year, they are probably going to be loyal. You’re going to have a 3 month ramp time regardless. Even if you have a developer who is already proficient in the technology you’ve employed, they are going to need to learn your own unique way of doing things. The kind of developer who would take on a position like that is probably the type who loves what they do, and will work overtime from home in order to get better at it, so you basically get double the hours from them at least in the beginning. The developer’s interest level in the technology is now based on the excitement of learning new things about it. You’re not likely to get that kind of commitment from a guy who has been developing in the same language for a decade.

Really my point is that in technology, tools change… sometimes frequently. Hiring for great teams makes it possible for you to move between tools while still maintaining your culture. If you hire for tools, that is all you get.

The enterprise versions of Adobe Coldfusion, Railo, and OpenBlueDragon all come with built in clustering using J2EE session management. Adobe’s version 9 comes with Hibernate support built-in… and Railo is soon to follow suit. Companies like Etrade, NASA, GoldLeaf, Caterpillar… all use ColdFusion. All of the parsers support enterprise DBMs like Oracle, MSSQL, Postgres, and MySql. All of the parsers come with a form of memory caching.

My only ‘guess’ is that he’s possibly talking about it not being financially scalable. Perhaps he doesn’t know that there are now 3 different open source CF parsers available? (openBlueDragon, Railo, Smith) Part of the reason why MySpace moved away from Coldfusion was primarily a licensing issue. Adobe ColdFusion licenses are not cheap, but they are justifiable. Even if he was talking about a financial scalability issue due to licensing… it’s just something that you build into your business model on the front end to make sure that you have the money available either through investment or financing.

Either way, we had already addressed the financial scalability issue by choosing Railo as the parser, and I built in my own clustered session management using in memory sessions backed up by persistent sessions in MySql. Combined with sticky sessions in Apache, a front end load balancer and simple MySql replication, and you have a pretty solid HA setup. It’s not J2EE, but it worked. We were also planning on rolling it into the cloud when we released it into production, and so those MySql servers would have had up to 32GB of RAM and 8 processor cores available to each of them (vertical scalability), with the web servers being horizontally scalable as much as needed. Down the road we could have always moved to MySql Clustering when it was actually needed, giving us true horizontal scalability. I’d say that’s pretty scalable.

My point is that it really is not the language that makes an application scalable. Certain tools can make it easier (Enterprise CF vs. Standard) … but it is really dependent on how the application is designed in the first place. Most of the HA scalability issues can (and should) be mitigated to the network and operating system layers rather than handling them within the application layer anyhow. Saying ‘Coldfusion is not scalable’ seems to me to be a real misunderstanding of how highly available applications are really built.

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
(abandonware)
Issues with IE Conditional Comments

http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/walkthrough-setup-multiple-ie-virtual-machines-on-a-mac/

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

http://lassauge.free.fr/qemu/

http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/need-multiple-ie-clients-mac-linux-run-virtual-box

http://blog.ryanparman.com/2009/06/30/run-ie6-ie7-ie8-images-virtualbox-macosx/

https://browserlab.adobe.com/index.html?sdid=EWRNK&
Very sweet… free… only requires an adobe login. Tests for IE 6-8 XP, Firefox 2-3.5 on OSX and XP, Chrome 3.0 (XP), Safari 3 and 4.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/microsoft-announces-superpreview-for-ie-browser-testing/

http://www.sitevista.com/

http://www.browsercam.com/

http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

http://browsershots.org/

Web Developer Toolbar

This thing gives you all sorts of information about the page that you’re viewing. Some of the toys available:

• Line Guides
• Ruler
• Display Div Order
• Display Element Information
• Resize Window
• Dom Inspector
• Validation tools for CSS, Feed, HTML, 508
• Outlining of Frames, Headings, Links, Tables, Block Level Elements, Positioned Elements
• Display Image File Sizes, dimensions, paths
• Disable CSS, Javascript
• Inline editing of Html and CSS

There are a ton of other features… well worth the donation.

In CakePHP … your database tables, models, controllers and views are all linked by the naming convention that is used…

• Database table: “dogs”
• Model class: “Dog”, found at /app/models/dog.php
• Controller class: “DogsController”, found at /app/controllers/dogs_controller.php
• View template, found at /app/views/dogs/index.ctp

It even has a cool little ‘inflector’ class that will take a string and pluralize it for you if you need help:

Example: Inflector::pluralize('dog') returns “dogs”.

Neat.

I remember what a pain Fusebox used to be … one of my biggest complaints about the framework was that it was so laden with XML configuration files everywhere!

Coldbox still has quite a bit of setup you need to go through using XML, but similar to the way that Fusebox has transitioned over time (I started with Fusebox at version 2!)… all of your models, views, and controllers (handlers) are CFC object based rather than dealing primarily in XML.

Mike Jones has a great video tutorial for CF8 that helped me get CF9 up and running under MAMP.

“I need someone organized and responsive above all else. I’m talking the type of guy (or girl) who checks email every 20 minutes.”

I thought it was funny… because I’m diligently trying to reduce the number of interruptions to my workflow by only initiating and responding to contact via email, chat, and phone calls during specific periods of the day. You might be ‘responsive’, but you can’t check your email every 20 minutes and be productive. I think this guy is looking for a support tech or project manager.

The problem with working with this type of client in this way is that it never forces them to become more organized themselves. I have burned out on these sorts of babysitter relationships before… and try to be very careful not to take them on anymore.

http://net.tutsplus.com/
Just came across this today… where have you been all my life?

http://freelanceswitch.com/
Another great site by those guys at Envato … I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/
Looking into some IDE bidness for PHP.