A Better Way to Restart CF8 During Flex Development

I am running the ColdFusion 8 Public Beta on Windows Vista Ultimate, on my notebook, doing localhost Flex Development with ColdFusion.

Flex requires a restart the ColdFusion Applicaton Server service every time you change your services-config.xml or data-management-config.xml files. Such files along with others are located in your Coldfusion8 directory inside the WEB-INF/flex folder.

On Vista Ultimate, when the ColdFusion Application Server service is stopped it takes up to 90 seconds for it to finally timeout and report that the service didn't respond; it essentially crashed. In my experience it rarely stops appropriately on Vista. This can get annoying after awhile, so here's a better way to start/stop ColdFusion 8, when doing Flex Development.

Change the startup on the ColdFusion Application Server service to Manual, here's how: Make sure the service is stopped or crashed. Then just right click on the service name and select properties. Change the startup type combobox to Manaul. That was easy. Push ok to exit.

Now how do you start and stop ColdFusion? Like this:

When there, your command-prompt will look like this:

After the prompt, type this command and hit Enter:

You will see many lines produced as JRun and ColdFusion startup. It will eventually stop after a few seconds, typically less than 30.

To stop the ColdFusion server just hit Ctrl-C.

To start the ColdFusion server, hit the up arrow and it should remember the command you used before - hit enter. Now it starts again.

This is a far more efficient way to stop and start ColdFusion 8 while doing Flex Development. It also acts as a console telling you what's going on with the ColdFusion server as your Flex app runs.