Installing Coldfusion MX 7 on MacBook Pro

I had a nightmare trying to install coldfusion mx 7 on my MacBook Pro laptop at work. I thought it would be easy enough to quickly install it so I could do some local development... not so!

I just tried installing the developer edition as a stand alone server but got an error at the end saying something like, "you've successfully completed the first step in installing coldfusion, however, the ColdFusion service does not appear to be running, the web server connectors did not install successfully.... etc.".

Since ColdFusion is all Java-based nowadays, it can run in any J2EE application server which is really cool. By default, it will use macromedia JRun for the cold fusion server/service. I think the first problem was that my mac had the 1.5 JVM and it seems that only 1.4.2 is supported. I've read a few other blogs, http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/5/17/CFMX-MacOSX-JVM142 and http://disorganism.com/past/2007/2/7/coldfusion_installer_problems_on_intel/ were a couple that helped me understand the issues.

It seems that there is a symbolic link (CurrentJDK i think) that points to the JVM. So an option that a few people used was pointing to the 1.4.2 JVM. I would've tried this but I was lacking sudo privileges and couldn't be bothered finding out passwords or getting support to elevate my privileges. I looked into a start-up script someone wrote (neatly packaged in a .dmg even) but still had no luck. It seemed to start JRun from the 1.4.2 JVM in another way and then try to start the coldfusion server. The other option was to use another j2EE server like tomcat but I was out of time to look any further into it.

I thought I'd try it at home on an older PC that I use for testing/development and hosting a couple of half-finished websites. I thought since it was on windows (for now, soon to be on linux) that it would be easy to install. No such luck! Same message at the end of the install, although in this case I was able to launch JRun, just not the coldfusion server!... argh! I even tried running it on the tomcat server I already had installed for my Java dev. I got much further, i.e. actually being able to process CFML pages but I couldn't reach the administrator and hence, couldn't set up my datasources, etc. Doh!

I guess I wasn't overly surprised that this PC didn't run too well as it's already serving up JSP and PHP. I even attempted to get an ASP module happening through Apache but that didn't quite work out.

I guess it's a bit frustrating that I haven't been able to set up coldfusion at home for a bit of fun that isn't real work... If anyone's had better successes than I, please post and let me know how you went about it...

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