Chase Seibert

Director of Engineering at Dropbox

Having moved to a Linux desktop at work, I'm in the process of migrating my development environment to the extent possible. Eclipse + JBOSS were a slam dunk. SQL Server is a definite no-go. I'm having good luck using VirtualBox for that. ColdFusion seems promising, but will entail some work.

The only reason it's promising, of course, is that my team has undertaken moving the code base from a stand-alone ColdFusion install to a vanilla JRun4 instance, and hopefully to a JBOSS instance, eventually. I'll go into more detail on that conversion process in a future post, as I learn more of it myself.

Converting from Windows to Linux shouldn't be that hard, one would think. Well, it turns out that the major sticking point so far is case-sensitivity. In Windows, you can CFINCLUDE a file, or hit a URL and it will work even if the cases don't match. Predictably, this means that a legacy Windows code base is likely to have many case-mismatches.

Fixing the code is an option, for sure. But for now, I've just been compiling a bash script to create symlinks between the requested file and the actual file. This is aided by the fact that ColdFusion logs each instance of a FileNotFound.

Stay tuned!