Off late, I've been doing a lot of development with Railo running on JBoss. So naturally, I wanted to plug in Apache Solr (which now ships with ColdFusion 9) into my JBoss instance running Railo.

What I thought would be straight-forward took a bit to figure out. The issue comes when you have to setup the solr.home property. The Apache Solr wiki suggests putting an <env-entry> node in the web.xml. However, if you do that, the XML does not validate as "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN". JBoss 5 is a little particular about web.xml validating properly -- which is a good thing!

So the trick to declare Solr home variable is to do this:

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My live blog site runs on ColdFusion (using JRun) with the SES servlet mappings in web.xml. I use the excellent MangoBlog engine for powering my blog. All this means that I have pretty-ish URLs like http://nagpals.com/blog/post.cfm/ftp-in-eclipse-hooray.

Today I wanted to run a copy of my blog on a dev box. But on that dev box, I chose to use JBoss-Tomcat. And the SES servlet mappings that work in ColdFusion on JRun, do NOT work on ColdFusion on Tomcat-JBoss as they are not supported by the servlet engine.

To get around it, I simply used Apache-based rewrites so that the SES urls like http://nagpals.com/blog/post.cfm/ftp-in-eclipse-hooray automatically get mapped to http://nagpals.com/blog/post.cfm?entry=ftp-in-eclipse-hooray.

Here are the rewrites that I put in place to get posts, categories, pages and search to work.

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Today I needed to use JConsole to connect up to a JBoss instance running ColdFusion and Railo. I wanted to see thread usage etc. when starting the application I'm working on.

In the past when I've used JConsole, it used to automatically detect the running JVMs and show them in the startup dialog box. However, today I wasn't seeing the running JVMs.

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