Re: [DFW CFUG] Variable scopes in CF Enterprise 8

[Steven Van Gemert]

Joe & Eric, Thanks for your input. I welcome any other ideas as well. I'm beginning to understand this... Joe, you pointed me to the question from Chris Jordan... well, Chris and I work together! This issue is for the same client, and so I have the same questions he had (which he put very well). We didn't get exact answers to some of them, and I added a few, maybe you guys can help us again. 1. Can you use the CF Standard edition with the three tiered architecture? 2. Joe, you stated (in the other thread) that a professional CF consultant recommended eliminating the middle tier, and putting the CF application server on the same box as the webserver. Well, that is what we are doing now, and they want to go to the three tiered architecture for security reasons (you know, put the linux webserver in the DMZ, and if some hacker gets in and blows it up, big deal, we put another in - at least the CF server is safe). That's their idea. I want to know if that is sound? Why would that consultant say to go with them on one box, if you sacrifice security (at least, in my clients eyes) to do it? 3. Joe, again in that other thread you've said that JRun should be avoided because it is old and has not had any patches in 2 years. You mean the software JRun, and not the jrun.exe that my current CF server runs on, correct? 4. I still do not understand the J2EE application server. Is that the only way to deploy CF in a three-tiered load-balanced environment where the webserver and the application server are separate boxes? Can that not be done with CF installed as a service on Windows? If not, do we have to buy JRun (or WebSphere or WebLogic, or get JBoss for free) to run it? (Pardon my ignorance - I am willing to learn) 5. Will my current structures that I store in the server and application and session scopes cease to work as I expect if we switch to the three-tiered architecture (and have everything configured correctly)? I know you don't know how I've coded things for my programs, but is there even a way to code these variables such that switching to the three-tiered environment will ruin those variables? Have they figured out all those inherent problems? Any answers you can provide would be much appreciated, even if you can only answer one of them! Thanks all! Steven Van Gemert Joe Kelly wrote: There was a discussion started by Christopher Jordan entitled "CF8 Enterprise" which various opinions were shared. Mine was that you should allow the load balancer to handle your clustering as the overhead is high for the servers to handle the clustering themselves. Go to http://www.mail-archive.com/list%40list.dfwcfug.org/ and search Christopher Jordan CF8 Enterprise Thanks, Joe Kelly On 10/19/07, Eric Knipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: CF8 offers some improvements in this area. Previous releases of CF would do session replication (if you turned it on) but this was limited to simple data types, arrays, and structures. If you followed OO "best practices" you would be up a creek as CFC's would not be replicated. However, in CF8, CFC's will be replicated as well, so you really don't need to use sticky sessions. Sticky sessions should be avoided as they create a single point of failure for the users "stuck" to the server(s) in question. On 10/19/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote: Have you tried the CF-TALK forum at houseoffusion.com ? It's arguably the best CF forum out there. My limited understanding of your situation is that when a user gets routed to a specific machine on their first request and that session is maintained on that machine. The key is to match session timeouts of your CF server and your load-balancing box. If you match those timeouts, then you shouldn't run into issues because once the CF session times out, if the user tries another request and they are routed to a different server, then it's okay that their session scope doesn't exist there since their CF session already timed out as well. We have a content switch and have "sticky sessions" enabled on it (so the user stays on whichever box they are first routed to) and set to 4 hours, and then we have session timeout in our app in CF set to 4 hours as well. This solves our problem when everything is up, but right now, if one server goes down, and a user was working on it, and the content switch sends them to another server because the server they were on is unavailable, they DO lose their session and have to log in again. Not a perfect environment, but works for what we need it for. Dave From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Steven Van Gemert Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 9:30 AM To: DFW CFUG Subject: [DFW CFUG] Variable scopes in CF Enterprise 8 Hi all, I have a question that one of you with experience with CF Enterprise will probably know off the top of your head. Although I've worked in CF for 7 years now, I've only ever used the Standard edition, and I am unsure about exactly how clustering works in the Enterprise edition. In a clustering/load-balancing/fail-over environment, how are the various variable scopes handled? Do you have to do something special to make session variables available? What about application and server variables? They're all stored in RAM, so I thought they must be limited to one machine only, and that requests should come in to that same machine. I even thought I saw a post at one time where you could download a particular script or patch or something that shares session variables to the other computers in the cluster - is that all necessary, and if so, does it work? Hopefully you can see what I mean. I'm just trying to see what code changes might be required to our programs when we switch from CFMX 6.1 over to CF Enterprise 8. If you think you have any answers for me about this or other topics regarding upgrade problems that you can put into just a couple of sentences, or can point me to a good forum thread that covers this, then please let me know. TIA Steven Van Gemert P.S. I have searched forum messages for this answer, and have been unsuccessful. I'm hoping to get something from you guys I can tell my client. :) _______________________________________________ Reply to DFWCFUG: List@list.dfwcfug.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists1.safesecureweb.com/mailman/listinfo/list List Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/list%40list.dfwcfug.org/ http://www.mail-archive.com/list%40dfwcfug.org/ DFWCFUG Sponsors: www.instantspot.com/ www.teksystems.com/ _______________________________________________ Reply to DFWCFUG: List@list.dfwcfug.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists1.safesecureweb.com/mailman/listinfo/list List Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/list%40list.dfwcfug.org/ http://www.mail-archive.com/list%40dfwcfug.org/ DFWCFUG Sponsors: www.instantspot.com/ www.teksystems.com/ _______________________________________________ Reply to DFWCFUG: List@list.dfwcfug.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists1.safesecureweb.com/mailman/listinfo/list List Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/list%40list.dfwcfug.org/ http://www.mail-archive.com/list%40dfwcfug.org/ DFWCFUG Sponsors: www.instantspot.com/ www.teksystems.com/

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