Avoid the GPS service "black hole"
Most fleet owners and managers recognize that knowing the precise location of your vehicles and their daily activities can quickly lead to substantial savings on fuel, overtime, insurance premiums, and other critical operational costs.

However, this is only one small part of the picture – the part anyone can see, even before they decide to use a GPS tracking system. The rest of the picture emerges only after a system has been installed.

Once you experience the financial boost that comes from your initial trimming away of wasteful driving patterns, side trips and fuel usage – what comes next?

All too often, the vendor that installed the system hasn't bothered to train you and your staff on how to make the most of the information you're getting in the long term - to incorporate it into your everyday processes and routine. They get you up and running, but you never see them again. This is the GPS service "black hole" that exists for most vendors of fleet management "solutions."

But the truth about GPS services is that the more you use them, the more valuable and indispensable they become for your daily operation. [Check out this customer success story for just one example of what we mean.] And the responsibility for making sure this is the case shouldn't be all yours.

Click here to read more about Avoid the GPS service "black hole" by Navtrak GPS Tracking

Navtrak Proudly uses ColdFusion 8, Flex, LCDS and many other products from the Adobe Stack of web technologies.

Ok, I know this isn't widely accepted as "ok" and not many people will ever do this, but having the ability to do this, is nice if you need it. And I needed it for a new project that is wrought with a boatload of .html files that I need to utilize and I do not have time to re-create things right now. Anyway, thanks to a couple sites (and oddly enough the final bit of information came from an Experts Exchange post) I have put all the pieces together to make this work with Coldfusion 8. Here is a link to the Adobe Technote on this process.

For the webserver side of it:

Windows 2003 (IIS 6.x)
In IIS manager, right-click the website and select properties. Select the Home Directory tab. Click Configuration. Select the .cfm extension in the list and click Edit. Copy the path in the Executable box to the clipboard.

Click Cancel. Click Add.

Paste the path in the Executable box. Type .html in the Extension box. Deselect the Check That File Exists option.

Click OK. Restart IIS.

Apache 2.2.x
Go to the configuration directory for Apache. Edit the httpd.conf file. Locate the "AddHandler jrun-handler" entry. Add the .html extension at the end of that line. For example: "AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm .cfml .cfc .cfr .cfswf .html" Save the file. Restart Apache.

Sun One Web Server 6.1 (iPlanet)
Go to the configuration directory for Sun One Web Server. Edit the obj.conf file. Locate the following line and copy it to the clipboard: ObjectType fn=type-by-exp exp=*.cfm type="jrun-internal/ext"

Create a duplicate of the code block by pasting it below the original. In the duplicate code, modify the exp attribute as follows : ObjectType fn=type-by-exp exp=*.html type="jrun-internal/ext"

Save the file and Restart the server.

Then for the Coldfusion side of it... edit this file: C:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\WEB-INF\web.xml

Modify and insert at the end of the other mappings (making sure to change the id="" sequential):

Step 2: Open a command window (Start --> Run --> type "cmd")navigate to: C:\Coldfusion8\runtime\bin enter this line exactly:

.\wsconfig -server coldfusion -ws IIS -site 0 -coldfusion -map ".htm,.html" -v

Restart the webserver. (using iis reset from a command line prompt)

Restart Coldfusion. (from the services panel in administrative tools)

Just a quick reminder to anyone who may run into this... When using Coldfusion and the Application.cfc - if you have an "onRequest" method in your Application.cfc file, you will NOT be able to expose CFC's as Webservices. I ran into this today while trying out something new, and for the life of me could not remember this key little fact!

Big shout out to the Coldfusion JediMaster - Ray Camden for the tip. Click here to visit his blog, it's the best way I can re-pay him for the memory jogging!

I don't really see it as that big of a deal, since the OnRequestStart() method exists, and I've always just kinda used that anyway... Can someone please explain the difference? and then also explain why the OnRequest method doesn't work in this setup? That kinda doesn't make sense to me at all.

Well, I think so. and I'll tell ya why.
But first, did you know that there were choices in the Coldfusion 8 Server Monitoring portion of the administrator to setup alerts?

Did you know that there were alerts that you could setup to let you know that your server was going into an "Unresponsive" state... and that while it was going to alert you, it would also start the task of killing hung threads all the while preventing new requests from bogging the server down once it gets back on it's feet?

Did you know that you could also watch the memory that is being used by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and if it gets to be too large you can have it do all of the above, plus spurn some garbage collection to boot?!

But that's not it, it gets better :)

You can also, detect that your server is "running slow" ie, too many requests taking too long, and do the all of the above, OOooh and I forgot you can email yourself too, heck you could even setup an sms gateway and send sms messages out to alert you, your team, even maybe the president on his blackberry :)

Anyway, i'd get into more of this here, but Charlie Arehart did a great job of explaining not only this but the entire "ColdFusion 8 server monitoring" series on Adobe.com's Developer Connection in the ColdFusion Developer Center.

Definitely check it out, I hadn't heard of this until tonight and that was a result of needing just the things this amazing feature offers! And with the aforementioned, I believe it would be possible to have a server that never goes down... right?

shhhh... big release at Navtrak tomorrow...

Introducing MyNavtrak
With MyNavtrak, we've brought together the latest web technology, usability principles and GPS-based tracking tools to create a single web portal from which you can track your fleet, run reports on vehicle activities, create and review routes, and much more.
Developed on the innovative new Adobe® Flex® platform, MyNavtrak is a rich internet application (RIA) with a fluid, intuitive interface that makes tracking and managing fleet activity easier than ever.
Users familiar with Street Suite®, our desktop-based vehicle tracking application, will find all of the same features they've come to depend upon available in MyNavtrak. But in addition to the sleek new design, we've added enhancements and new features to make managing your fleet even easier, including:

• Improved map zoom and pan controls
• Smarter vehicle location/identification
• Updated vehicle and place clustering
• Turn-by-turn directions and route analysis tools
• Self-paced online training videos
• Multiple map/vehicle status display options (very helpful for dispatchers)
• To get a better idea of what MyNavtrak looks like and what it can do for you, browse through our gallery of screenshots of the application.

So I've had a lot of clients over the years, but none as long as friend and high school mate Blair Rinnier, and his online company, Net-Properties.com. Starting Net-Properties.com in 1998, Blair and his partner Henry Hanna had an idea that the web would be a great place to broker Net leased properties (NNN Triple Net Lease)... and the fact that they are around today, stands as a testament to the quality of business they give to their clients. Even in these economic times, things are still looking up for the no-longer web start-up but seasoned web company.

Their site is driven by ColdFusion, designed in Photoshop and well, of course the back-end database system for the properties and their clients is SQL server 2000.

Anyway, the cool part of the story is detailed below as relayed to me just the other day...

Things ColdFusion is not... and... Why ColdFusion isn't free...
this has to be the best defense for the price of coldfusion, as well as the best explanation of WHAT it is. HOW it helps you. and WHAT you get out of it...

quite a compelling article written up by jason delmore the product manager at adobe for our beloved coldfusion.

Read the full article here

yeah, thats the number of lines in a CFC that i have written that does a LOT of work for my core reporting application at my company, navtrak.

so, you ask, why does that matter? well... friends, romans and countrymen, it appears that this is a hard limit to the number of lines that will effectively run in a CFC before it craps out. if i add one more line of code, thats right, one freakin' more line and BOOM, it just doesnt work.

this includes comments, code, whitespace, whatever. in my IDE, homesite+ it reads as 3999 lines. thats it. so, for what its worth, maybe a CFC SHOULDNT be that big... but why such a limit?

is there something else going on here? i dont think so, as i can remove just one line, get me back to 3999, and it works fine. if i go over, to 4000, nada.

anyway, just thought i'd let y'alls know.