In an effort to get up to speed on ColdBox, an MVC application framework for ColdFusion, I wanted to make use of the very cool code generator called Illudium PU-36. Clearly the author is a Looney Toons fan. I’ve spent the last few days getting my old Dell Inspiron 9300 running with Ubuntu Linux 9.04. Shout-out to those folks for an AWESOMELinux distribution. So I’ve got LAMPP setup with Apache, and ColdFusion 8 developer edition all ready to rock.

I proceed to download Illudium PU-36 and extract it to a folder. First thing, you must name your folder cfcgenerator. I then moved into Apache config files and setup the virtual host entry, as well as an entry in /etc/hosts so I can reference the site as http://cfcgenerator.dev.

<virtualhost *:80>
	ServerAdmin webmaster@codegenerator.dev
	ServerAlias cfcgenerator.dev
	DocumentRoot "/home/psykoprogrammer/code/coldfusion/cfcgenerator"
	ServerName cfcgenerator.dev

	<directory "/home/psykoprogrammer/code/coldfusion/cfcgenerator">
	Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
	AllowOverride FileInfo
	Order allow,deny
	Allow from all
	</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

From here I tried to browse to my new site once I restarted CF and Apache. No love. Just a crazy blank screen. After a lot of googling I came across forum entries suggesting that I needed to install Adobe’s Flash player instead of the free Ubuntu maintained player. This is especially true in my case, as I am running Firefox 3.5.

Here’s a tip when installing Adobe Flash Player on Ubuntu Linux with Firefox 3.5. If you have installed Firefox ina directory other than the default location where Ubuntu installs it, your Flash installation will appear to fail. This is because it is installing in the default location, and not the one you installed. To fix this little problem download the TAR file from Adobe and extract it to a location of choice. Open a terminal and change directory to this location. From here it is important to run the flashplayer-installer as root like so: sudo ./flashplayer-installer. This allows you to specify the installation directory of your browser.

Ok, now Illudium PU-36 is started! Woot! Oh, wait… big fat error. It cannot seem to find components in the cfcgenerator directory. At this point I tried putting a CF mapping, but that didn’t seem to help. Here’s the trick. First off, keep the mapping because it is going to come in handy. The next task is to find the configuration file remoting-config.xml in your ColdFusion installation directory’s web root. Mine is /opt/coldfusion8/wwwroot/WEB-INF/flex. Open this file and find the entry for **. Set it to true, and restart CF.

Viola!! It works! Happy coding!