@Chris--feel free to post to our mailing list as well--always lots of great help there. But I'll take this as a prompt to write up something on upgrades for the wiki, and I'll copy your question and my response to the mailing list to make sure people get the benefit of the discussion if they don't see this comment thread on the blog.

The WAR is an entire web application so you definitely don't want to replace everything in your web app when upgrading to the new version of OpenBD. As you discovered, you may lose some things in the process.

The real "guts" of OpenBD are all contained in the web app's WEB-INF directory, more specifically in the WEB-INF/lib directory, so while you can simply copy the new version's JAR files into your WEB-INF/lib directory, in general it's better to replace the whole WEB-INF directory with the new version's WEB-INF because there is functionality in other directories. For example the CFVIDEOPLAYER resources are in the WEB-INF/webresources directory, so if you only copied over the new JAR files you might miss out on some things.

All of the administrator settings are stored in a single file, namely WEB-INF/bluedragon/bluedragon.xml. For an upgrade you can just copy that file to somewhere outside your WEB-INF directory before doing the upgrade, then replace the old WEB-INF directory with the new one, and copy your bluedragon.xml file back into the WEB-INF directory. Note that since you're free to put other things in your WEB-INF directory manually (which some people do since it's not browsable), you may want to just take a backup of the entire WEB-INF directory (or to be totally safe the entire webapp) before replacing it with the new version.

Also note that if you're doing this while Tomcat is running, you may have to stop the individual webapp you're upgrading since some of the files may be in use.

Hope that helps! Sorry you lost your admin settings. Follow up on the mailing list if you have additional questions. Thanks!

I'm new to Tomcat and BlueDragon. Are there instructions on how to upgrade to 1.1? I tried to replace the .war file and I lost all my cfAdmin settings.

Any help is appreciated.

Aaron, there is a special virtual layer that is being built so you don't have to worry too much about it. In other words the ability to use FileRead/FileWrite will exist. Still early days though. Join the OpenBD mailing list for more details

How does OpenBD deal with writing files in the App Engine Build? Is it directly working in Google's API--or--does the developer still need to figure it out?

Thanks,

-Aaron Greenlee

Good to see CFVIDEOPLAYER making its way into CFML. I compared your tag attributes with Railo's here: http://wiki.getrailo.org/wiki/3-1-Tags:CFVideoPlayer. They are similar, but there are a few differences (ie, autostart, etc).

Hopefully you guys can get together at the CFML advisory committee meeting @ CF.obj and straighten everything out so there is uniformity with the new tags. Better to address it ASAP then wait until people start building apps with it.

It was added as a quick way to be building out path names, particularly, useful when using the FileXXX() functions, as our implementation supports many different endpoints dependent on the protocol specified. For the majority of instances the "/" will work just fine, but there are instances where you really do need to know the underlying path implementation. Java tries it best to match the paths and convert between them, but its not always reliable.

Can I ask why fileSeparator() was added? Given that - I assume - OpenBD is like Adobe CF in that / works for ALL file operations over all operating systems, why would you encourage someone to use a function to get the separator? Why not just always use / and a) type less and b) not worry about it? I'm not saying the function is completely useless - you may need to visually present a path to someone, but still, for most cases, it is overkill.