Behind Aisle8

Gmail Down - 502 error message

Well, it looks like I really can’t blame this on a flaky WIFI connection at the coffee shop. Gmail is returning a 502 error. In other words, gmail is down. Looks like I’m not the only one. There’s some chatter HERE on google groups.

So, what exactly causes a 502 error?  The folks at checkupdown.com have a nice explanation here.  They suggest cleaning out your browser cache, but it looks like this is beyond that.  We’ve tried from an ISP in NY and one in the Midwest.  If you’re not logged in to your account it will authenticate you.  The error occurs after authentication.  Curious.

Update - Looks like they’ve excercised their demons (or restarted their daemons).  After almost an hour gmail is back.

The OpenBlueDragon site says “Open BlueDragon, is the worlds favourite open source GPL J2EE CFML runtime engine…Available to download today as a standard Java J2EE WAR file, or completely pre-configured JETTY server, VMWare/Amazon image, you can be up and running within minutes.

The British spelling of “favourite” might indicate that OpenBlueDragon has made a jump across the pond and may be on it’s way to world dominance, so I decided to see if indeed I could be up and running in minutes. I was.

I’m familiar with WAR files, VMWare images and setting up Amazon EC2 virtual machines with ElasticFox, but I’d never even heard of JETTY. After a few minutes of Google to resolve fears that JETTY would somehow destroy my local Apache install I dove in.

It couldn’t have been easier. Basically you unzip the file, type in a run command at the command prompt and your up and running. Take a look at the screencast below and dive in.

Next up: Drive Mappings and Data Sources.

 

 Test Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

OpenBlueDragon, “the worlds favourite GPL open source J2EE CFML runtime engine” is out and available at OpenBlueDragon.org. This is a fantastic addition to the open source world.

For the last eight years I’ve built three companies and made a good living developing coldfusion applications. We’ve all watched as the product and our destiny passed from Allaire to Macromedia to Adobe. ColdFusion books bloomed on the shelves of Borders and Barnes and Noble only to disappear into Amazon. I’ve cycled through Ruby and PHP and loathed .Net and at the end of the day, I can *STILL* get more out the door with CFML than I can with anything else. Now we can finally take the bull by the horns.

There are, of course other Non-Adobe CFML projects, but OpenBlueDragon seems to have what it takes to carry the day. We’ve been waiting for this for some time, and are planning to port our condoEngine application from Win2k / IIS / CFMX 6.1 / SqlServer setup to Linux / OpenBlueDragon / MySql, or Firebird… We plan to document our little adventure on this blog.

We’re also working on getting OpenBlueDragon working on or Parrallels - Plesk based hosting platforms. Plesk currently has both ColdFusion and Tomcat integrated into the control panel. There are a lot of small hosting companies - and some large ones - using Plesk. Getting OpenBlueDragon running on Plesk servers may help introduce many new users to the project.

We’ll keep posting…