Installed Lucee / Tomcat on my MacBook Air

Been wanting to get more comfortable developing locally on my MacBook Air so I decided to get Lucee / Tomcat up and running tonight while I watched the Flyers game.  I found a great article that really made the process super simple:

Brian Love's Article on Installing Lucee on OSX

Following the instructions on this page really just made this point and shoot.  I do want to learn how to setup multiple sites running either via apache or tomcat, but at this point I can develop locally.

Another item I wanted to figure out was how to connect to a mySQL server I have running on my VPS, so I didn't have to keep two DB's in sync.  Doing a little digging a found a pretty simple way of doing this using an ssh tunnel.  Here is the command that I ended up using:

ssh git@servername.com -p 22 -L 3306:127.0.0.1:3306 -N

You can shift that command to the background or just leave it running in a terminal window.  Once you have this running you can then go into the Lucee administrator and create your datasource connection to your mySQL database like it is running on your local computer.

Was a very productive evening fiddling around...

Been a long time...

Hoping to start a more regular blogging schedule now that I am developing some projects for myself again.  I am finally recharged and energized about programming.  On a side note, if you ever are working somewhere that causes you to dread what you love, leave quickly, no matter the financial cost, I nearly stopped programming because I waited to long to leave and it has taken nearly 3 years to recover...

OK, now onto what I am working on, LemonsWiki, this is a project to curate and category all the 24 Hours of Lemons videos I can find on YouTube.  It is written using Railo 3.3 at this time, soon it will be on Lucee 5.0.  The database is mySQL, but may be moving to MongoDB.  jQuery is used heavily, along with Bootstrap for the HTML5 framework.  I am also debating using AngularJS for the front-end.  The point of the project is to take something I love, racing and tie to to something else I love, programming, while learning a bunch of new technologies.

Other things I am doing with this project is using git, including my own private repository server, to develop locally, upload to my repository server and then when ready deploy to the production site.  I will be adding a staging domain to the mix shortly as well so I can test changing on the production server prior to going to true production.  Making this workflow change is a huge shift for me, I have been used to developing on a dev server, then pushing to a stage server, then going to a production server.  All development being done on the server.  Now I am running Lucee, IIS and mySQL locally on my desktop computer, using Brackets as my IDE.  I must admit I am liking this new model of development in some ways, others I still need to figure out, like how to keep two DB's in sync.

Anyways, first of many more posts as I develop this site, officially it is live, but I haven't really announced it or done anything to promote, so this is kind of it's coming out party...Enjoy!