ColdFusion Railo deployment with Jelastic

I thought I'd try one of the cloud java hosting platforms out there and I must say I'm delighted I did. I wanted to start up a Jelastic instance and throw Railo on it and see how it worked out.

First up sign in is super simple, just your email and thats all you need. The user interface is clean, powerful and incredibly simple. With simple drop downs to create your environment and configure the number of instances etc that you need. In just a few minutes you can be up and running.
So i chose Tomcat 6. I did initally try Tomcat 7 but apparently they have a few problems with 7 at the moment. Not to worry 6 is fine. Deploy your environment and then wait for it to be deployed. This takes just a minute or so while they build your instance.

Then down at the bottom you'll see the deployment manager tab, under that you should see upload. You'll need to upload your Railo.war you can upload one you've downloaded, or I believe, upload direct from www.getrailo.org:

Once you've uploaded the .war file, you need to deploy it. Simple, still in the deployment manager tab, click on the box dropdown and click deploy. It'll ask you to confirm "ROOT" as the context, but root is fine. Once this is done you should be able to click the "launch in browser" button and see the railo admin show.

That's it, you're basically done. I expect you want your own application to run, but that's just as easy. If you click on the spanner / config option next to Tomcat 6 a settings tab will open and you can tweak the tomcat settings. Expand webapps and root. This is your application home, you can delete everything in there except for the WEB-INF folder. Then upload your cfm files and you're done!

I think this is a brilliant hosting environment and so brethlessly simple I'm very impressed.

Setting up a custom domain for your Google App Engine (GAE) app

Setting up a Google App Engine application with a custom domain is a pain in the ass. Its overly complicated and takes much too long. Still, i did it and made it work, so I figured I’d write it down.

1. Sign into GAE and in the list of my applications, click on your application. You should see the GAE dashboard. Somewhere down the list on the left you should see Application Settings. Click on that. Scroll way down and somewhere under “Domain Setup” you’ll see a button “Add Domain”. Now open a new window or something because we’ll need to come back to this tab later. This is where you’ll need to signup for Google Apps.


2. Google Apps. I’m not 100% sure exactly how to define Google Apps, but I think it’s best described as a host of business services all under one roof. It’s basically a central place for businesses to utilise online tools to work and collaborate. My words, not Googles! Anyway, you need an account to make this work, it is free so go ahead and sign up and answer the endless questions. Get everything sorted and when its all up and running you can move on to adding the domain you bought to your Google Apps account.


3. Register your domain. Next you need to add your domain to Google Apps, this means telling Google about the domain that you’ve already registered and proving you own it. Google is nice here, they have a few methods of doing this. The one I used is for Google to ask you to copy a verification code of sorts and add it to a special txt key on your domain. If you’re using goDaddy like I am, this is pretty straight forward. You just need to sign into your goDaddy domain manager and paste in the code. From there Google will verify the domain and add the domain to your account. You can also upload a special Google HTML file to your server, but that’s a lot of work!


4. Update your DNS. Now we need to change our DNS to point to google. I use goDaddy and this was deceptively simple, basically just login to GoDaddy’s DNS manager and click edit zone for your domain name. You want to change the www attribute for your CNAME record. Change it to ghs.google.com and your done.


5. Finally you can go back to your original tab from step 1 where you’re still in GAE and add “www” (not inverted commas) as the domain. This should magically link everything up and hey presto your domain should point to your gae app.

This is a much shorter, and helpful description, well done “Mark” who figured it out and helped me a lot: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/817809/how-to-use-google-app-engine-with-my-own-domain-not-subdomain

Setup an AWS EC2 Instance Running Railo

Setup an AWS EC2 Instance Running Railo

OK so you want to delve deep into cloud computing and start your own instance Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance? Sadly the “official” Railo AMI seems to have died, so here we’ll be starting our own new one. We’ll be running firmly within the free criteria here and choosing options appropriately, most significantly this means linux! We’ll also be using putty to connect to our instance. For part of this tutorial we’re going to be running alongside the official Amazon starting an instance guide. So I will skimp on the details already covered by Amazon themselves:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/GetStartedLinux.html

Start-up an Instance

1. Click the giant “Launch an Instance” button. Select Basic Amazon Linux AMI I choose 32bit because it’s cheaper and (at the moment) free.
2. Ensure you’ve selected a micro instance.
3. Skip the instance details section, just accepting the defaults.
4. Create and download a Key Pair. This is important as it allows us to log onto our instance securely.
5. Next is the firewall or security groups section. This bit is important as it configures what applications and ports are allowed to access your instance. Create a new security group. You should select SSH and HTTP as a minimum, you can accept the default of 0.0.0.0 but that allows any IP access to these ports. This is fine for HTTP but if your ISP has given you a static IP then put this in for SSH.
6. Done, your instance will begin powering up. Watch the instances dashboard to see it’s status, eventually the status will flick to green, display “running” and the status checks will show 2/2. Once that happens we’re ready to logon.

Connect to your instance
I’m going to leave this bit a little to Amazon to explain. You’ll need to download and install putty and convert your key pair file (from step 4 above) into a putty private key file. Then grab your amazon public dns value (something like ec2-11-11-111-111.compute-1.amazonaws.com) and connect to it using putty. Don’t forget to enter the username ec2-user.

Get Linux straight & Install Railo

1. First lets get Linux to update itself:

sudo yum update

2. Download Railo to the instance:

wget http://www.getrailo.org/down.cfm?item=/railo/remote/download/3.3.1.000/tomcat/linux/railo-3.3.1.000-pl1-linux-installer.run

3. Assign permissions

sudo chmod 777 railo-3.3.1.000-pl1-linux-installer.run

4. Run Railo

sudo ./railo-3.3.1.000-pl1-linux-installer.run

Here you’ll want to accept all the defaults except three. First change the default password to something good. Second you should set the port to 80 (not 8888). This will allow normal connections to your server and links into why we had to allow HTTP (port 80) in the EC2 security group. Lastly you should say no to the apache connectors. This sets up railo with tomcat and installs tomcat for you. Of course if you’re more familiar with apache then go with that.

Hit your url
http://ec2-11-11-111-111.compute-1.amazonaws.com

The above link (customized for your public DNS) should show you the default Railo welcome page.

Use putty and VI to change your cfm files

1. Navigate to the webroot:

cd /opt/railo/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/

2. Remove all these files

sudo rm -rf *

3. Create a new index.cfm file

sudo vi index.cfm

VI - Linux editor

1. In vi to delete the contents of the whole file type

:1,$d

2. To swap between command and insert modes just press escape


3. To exit without saving, switch to command mode and press

:q!

4. To exit and save switch to command mode and press

:x

ColdFusion and Amazon AWS SES - Simple Email Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have a service called Simple Email Service (SES), SES is an excellent e-mail sending service for businesses and developers. It enables developers to quickly and easily send emails without having to go through the pains of setting up an SMTP server or any of that nonsense. It is intended for bulk sending marketing material, but you can also use it in very low volumes and it becomes a great tool.

To demonstrate the service, we’re going to use SES to send an email to ourselves using coldFusion. First and foremost you’ll need to sign up to SES (https://aws.amazon.com/ses/) and verify an email address. SES starts up in “development mode” where you have to verify every email address you want to send mail too. This is a fantastic feature that prevents accidental sending of email and lets you test out the functionality. For the purpose of this example development mode is perfect, so sign up and verify your own email address.

There are quite a few ways to get SES to send an email for you, we’re going to use what I think is the easiest to get started with, a POST request. It’s basically just liked submitting a form, but we’re going to use cfhttp to mimic a form post. First though, there’s a few things we need to setup before we actually do any coding.

1) Security details
Obviously it would be a pretty crummy service if anyone could use your email service to send emails to anyone, spam would run rampant! So there a few security details we need to get from amazon to authenticate each SES request. I won’t go into too much detail but you’ll need an “Access Key ID” and a “Secret Access Key”. You get these from amazon by logging into your aws account and clicking security credentials from the top right drop down. Look at this page for a bit more info:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/QueryInterface.Authentication.html#QueryInterface.Authentication.Signatures

2) HMAC - Hash-based Message Authentication Code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC
To authenticate our message Amazon requires use of a security algorithm called HMAC. The theory being if we (us and Amazon) have a shared private key, we can encrypt a known variable and authenticate ourselves. This is a very very brief introduction if you’ve never come across HMAC. HMAC is a cryptography method of creating a hash using a secret key. Normally a hash takes any value and creates a fixed length string. For example, using the MD5 hash in CF:

 hash(‘all your base are belong to us’)  

would return
847DBEB849668D30722D8A67BCED1C59

With HMAC we introduce a secret key to add an extended element of cryptography and security to the proceedings. Here’s an example:
 

 toString(toBase64(HMAC_SHA1('password','all your base are belong to us')))  

z0A498Rx0aNzXNOwfbjSKkhBdbA=

HMAC can use MD5 or SHA1 and Amazon does support both, but we’re going to use SHA1. Now coldFusion doesn’t offer the HMAC function by default, but that’s not to say we can’t write or borrow our own..

 <cffunction name="HMAC_SHA1" returntype="binary" access="public" output="false" hint="I create an HMAC hashed string from a given message and secret key.">  
      <cfargument name="signKey" type="string" required="true" hint="Secret key with which to encrypt message" />  
      <cfargument name="signMessage" type="string" required="true" hint="Message you want to hash"/>  
      <cfset var jMsg = JavaCast("string",arguments.signMessage).getBytes("iso-8859-1") />  
      <cfset var jKey = JavaCast("string",arguments.signKey).getBytes("iso-8859-1") />  
      <cfset var key = createObject("java","javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec") />  
      <cfset var mac = createObject("java","javax.crypto.Mac") />  
      <cfset key = key.init(jKey,"HmacSHA1") />  
      <cfset mac = mac.getInstance(key.getAlgorithm()) />  
      <cfset mac.init(key) />  
      <cfset mac.update(jMsg) />  
      <cfreturn mac.doFinal() />  
 </cffunction>  

3) Create your Amazon authenticated header

Next we want to create our HMAC hash to pass to Amazon, they require us to encrypt the date and time, so to do so looks a little like this:

 <cfset variables.dteOldDate = now() />  
 <cfset variables.strDateString = "#DateFormat(variables.dteOldDate, 'ddd, dd mmm yyyy')# #timeFormat(variables.dteOldDate,'HH:mm:ss')# GMT" />  
 <!--- encrypt date --->  
 <cfset variables.xxxHMac = toString(toBase64(HMAC_SHA1(“yoursecretaccesskeygoeshere”,variables.strDateString))) />  

Next we need to integrate our hashed date with a header called a X-Amzn-Authorization

 <cfset variables.strAmazonHeader = "AWS3-HTTPS AWSAccessKeyId=#youraccesskeyidgoeshere#, Algorithm=HmacSHA1, Signature=#xxxHMac#" />  

So obviously replace youraccesskeyidgoeshere with the Access Key you got from Amazon.


4) Make the httpd call

That’s the complicated bit done, now all we have to do is make the cfhttpd call.

 <cfhttp url="https://email.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/" method="post" result="result">  
      <cfhttpparam type="header"       name="X-Amzn-Authorization" value="#variables.strAmazonHeader#" />  
      <cfhttpparam type="header"       name="Date" value="#variables.strDateString#" />  
      <cfhttpparam type="formfield"      name="Action" value="SendEmail" />  
      <cfhttpparam type="formfield"      name="Destination.ToAddresses.member.1" value="#yourToEmailAddressGoesHere#" />  
      <cfhttpparam type="formfield"      name="Message.Body.Text.Data" value="#yourEmailContentGoesHere#" />  
      <cfhttpparam type="formfield"      name="Message.Subject.Data" value="#yourEmailSubjectGoesHere#" />  
      <cfhttpparam type="formfield"      name="Source" value="yourFromEmailGoesHere" />  
 </cfhttp>   

That's it, run your code and you should receive an email!

Assigning your GoDaddy domain name to your Amazon S3 bucket

In the previous post we setup a static website using Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket storage. Now we’re going to assign the fancy new godaddy domain we just bought to that bucket.
You will need:
    - A GoDaddy Domain
    - An working S3 bucket hosting your website

1. Bucket Name
First and foremost in the last post we named our bucket whatever we want. In this post it’s crucially important we are very careful with what we name our bucket. Amazon gets the bucket name to use from the URL, so you’ll need to match your domain with your bucket name. For example if my domain was www.mygreatwebsite.com you would need to make sure your bucket was called www.mygreatwebsite.com So if you haven’t already done that, go ahead and create a new bucket. You can easily copy and paste your files across from your old bucket. Of course make sure it’s setup as a website all works with the S3 URL.

2. GoDaddy Domain Manager
First we need to open what GoDaddy call the zone manager, there may be better ways to find it but here’s how i get there. Open godaddy.com, hover the mouse over Domains and click “Domain Manager” and login. Hover over Tools and click “DNS Manager”. In the list of your domains click “Edit Zone” next to your domain. You’ll see a bunch of information here, but in short you’re looking under the CNAME heading for www. By default it’s value is @. You need to remove this at symbol and change it to: mygreatwebsite.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
Obviously replacing the url with the one for your S3 bucket. Especially the “eu-west” bit and the mygreatwebsite.com with yourgreatwebsite.com and save. This is where the name of your bucket we mentioned in step one becomes so important.

You may want to check you don’t have forwarding turned on. The first time I set this up I just used domain forwarding, which is a neat and easy to use feature, but it just creates an iframe for your site, which won’t help your SEO one little bit. That said, it is a very quick and simple to use feature of GoDaddys. You can turn domain forwarding on and off in the DSN manager using the forward button at the top.

If you own http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com then (I believe) you have to either setup two buckets one called mysite.com and one called www.mysite.com or of course you could forward one domain to the other.

That’s it, sit back and be patient, domain changes can take a few hours to process so go buy some donuts and cross your fingers. Hopefully that all worked like a dream.

I owe a lot to this guy, Aaron Blohowiak and his excellent blog entry: http://aaronblohowiak.com/using-amazon-s3-and-cloudfront-to-host-a-stat

and also this this one by Steve Liles:
http://steveliles.github.com/pointing_a_domain_name_to_an_amazon_s3_bucket.html

Creating an Amazon AWS S3 Static Website

OK this is going to be a fairly short and simple post, but I want to take you through the steps as it will lead nicely into my follow up post. Basically what we’re going to do is use Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 to host our static website. This is a great feature of AWS whereby their cloud storage services can be used to host a website.

1. Create a bucket - Sign Up for AWS and goto the console. Then click the S3 tab at the top and click “Create Bucket” underneath the tab. Buckets are amazon’s storage containers, they hold all your files. You’ll want to choose a region closest to where your users will be. Your bucket name has to be unique, and obviously useful to you, in my next post I’ll talk more about how you need to link it to your domain name if you decide to use a custom domain for your bucket.

2. Upload your files - Click on your bucket and upload your files. CSS, HTML, Images etc. I like to have a separate bucket for my images and or you can use AWS CDN services, but that’s another story.

3. Setup the bucket as a website - Click on your bucket and click properties. Goto the website tab and click Enabled and set the index document to your index.htm file or whatever. Click save.

4. Set bucket permissions - Click the permissions tab and click “Add bucket Policy” copy the following text, replacing the name of your bucket with the words mybucketname, then click save.

{
 "Version":"2008-10-17",
 "Statement":[{
    "Sid":"PublicReadForGetBucketObjects",
       "Effect":"Allow",
      "Principal": {
           "AWS": "*"
        },
     "Action":["s3:GetObject"],
     "Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::mybucketname:/*"
     ]
   }
 ]
}



That’s it, your URL should be something like:
http://mybucketname.s3-website-region.amazonaws.com

Jquery gradual loading page

Ever wanted to do a google mail, gmail style gradual loading type page. Where the longer something takes the more messages you get.

So for example something taking ages to load would say:

"loading..."

"still loading....."

"sorry this is taking ages, trying to fix it now...."

gradually, over time. Well i worked that out recently with jquery, it's not rocket science but it's a cute bit of code, made all the easier with jquery. Now before i go on, i'm no javascript expert and definitely i'm no jquery expert. In fact i'm only a few weeks into my jquery life. So if you know a better way about this, then do let me know.

Apologies once again for the poor code sampling, i simply can't work well with google blogger and code samples.

<html>
<head>
 <script language="javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
 <title>Jay loadings</title>
 <script>
  var loadComplete = false;
  
  //straight away load the loading page
  $.ajax({
   url: "loading.htm",
   cache: false,
   success: function(html){
    $("#mydiv").html(html);
    //if thats done and if page still not completed, do a still loading page
    var t1=setTimeout("if(loadComplete == false){$.ajax({url: 'loading2.htm',cache: false,success: function(html){$('#mydiv').html(html);}});}",2000);
    var t1=setTimeout("if(loadComplete == false){$.ajax({url: 'loading3.htm',cache: false,success: function(html){$('#mydiv').html(html);}});}",6000);
   }
  });
  
  //when target.cfm is ready, load it.
  $(document).ready(function(){
   $.get("target.cfm",
    function(data){
    $("#mydiv").html(data);
    loadComplete = true;
   });  
  });  
 </script>
</head>



<div id="mydiv"></div>  

</html>