Never have to open your Service Control Panel again! System Manager is a great utility for developers that are constantly starting, stopping and restarting multiple services while they work. Instead of writing bulky, and possibly time-consuming, batch files, just let System Manager do all the work for you. It has an easy, drag-and-drop interface for creating, modifying and removing services and Service Groups from your list.

It also assigns a shortcut letter to each service you want to manage, so you can start, stop or restart any service with one mouse click and two key presses at any time. Service Groups get assigned a shortcut number so firing off a batch of service actions is just one mouse click and one keypress away.

Download System Manager and watch the tutorial movie to get a quick start on using it.

System Manager 1.4 Notes
———————————————
- Services inside Groups are now saved in the correct order
- Can delete Service Groups or service inside Groups
- Improved interface for creating Service Groups
- Multiple minor bug fixes

Turns out the problem wasn’t in the driver or the cluster. I had one crucial element missing from my connection string. I had to use the ServiceName parameter instead of the SID parameter since the Listener was setup that way.

Final connect string:
jdbc:macromedia:oracle://10.33.50.55:1521; ServiceName=PODQASVC; AlternateServers=(10.33.50.56:1521); ConnectionRetryCount=180; ConnectionRetryDelay=5; sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false; MaxPooledStatements=300

I got this from a link Steve Erat posted on his site, but I’ll post it again here for redundancy’s sake.

Connection Failover with the Oracle Driver

Most Google applications are neat – in that I try them, am wowed, and then rarely use them again – but this one I’m finding very useful as I read a lot of blogs. I particularly like the simplified interface, and no-reload browsing of messages.

Google Reader Beta

Orbwave Memory Explorer 0.1.103

Using the ajaxCFC framework provided by Rob Gonda, I put together a basic application that you can run to provide you with realtime graphs and charts displaying your JVM memory usage. You have the choice of the following views.

1. Total JVM
2. Eden Space
3. Survivor Space
4. Tenured Gen
5. Permanent Gen
6. All memory spaces

In each view, you can choose to have the charts update every 2.5, 5, 15, 30 or 60 seconds. Having shorter intervals is great for when you are actively watching the memory to identify problems or monitor your usage, and then switch to long intervals for historical charts.

This is my first version, so it’s still rough. I’ll be updating it in the weeks to come with new features and better navigation. Installation is easy. Simply unzip the package and place the resultant memoryExplorer folder under your webroot. Then hit http://localhost/memoryExplorer.

Important Note: You need to be running on the 1.5 JDK for this application to work.

Edit: Some people have contacted me asking why there is a 1.5 JDK requirement on this application. Previous versions of Java simply do not provide the ability to poke around the different memory spaces of your JVM and restrict you to total JVM usage monitoring. I wrote this bit of code for myself and a few clients who also upgraded to Java 5. ColdFusion runs flawlessly in Java 5, but be aware that Adobe is only going to provide you with support up to the 1.4.2 JDK (which is what ships with ColdFusion).

Getting a peek at the ServiceFactory package provided in CFMX provides you with some information, and functionality that the Admin API doesn’t have. You can enhance the debugging output while developing, on-demand rolling of log files, register and start new gateways, and more. Here’s a good start to see what methods are available to you.

<cfscript>
factory = createobject("java", "coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory");
</cfscript>

<cfdump var="#factory#">

To see a full dump of the factory service follow the permalink to this message in the menu to the left. (it’s a truncated view with many unusable methods removed).

Here’s some fun methods to try out.

<cfdump var="#factory.LoggingService.rollLogs()#">
<cfdump var="#factory.DebuggingService.getDebugger().getData()#">