There are many situations when it is necessary to access a session variable from outside the actual session. You may want an administrative page to list active users or you may want to utilize a scheduled task to process data stored in user’s sessions.

While it’s simple enough to create a sessions structure in the application scope to store all sessions, cleanup becomes an issue and you’re really duplicating work that ColdFusion must be doing internally anyways. After some digging I found that ColdFusion MX has a SessionTracker class that it uses to keep track of all sessions and you can access it to!

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Occasionally when working with Java classes in ColdFusion MX gold you receive an error message, java.lang.IllegalAccessException. Why did you receive this when the method you’re calling is public? Why do we care since it’s been fixed in ColdFusion MX 6.1?

The answer to the first question leads into the second–exploring these issues helps us learn more about how ColdFusion MX works.
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As an enterprise customer one of my favorite new features of ColdFusion MX 6.1 is the new licensing. It will give us much greater flexibility in changing our installations from their current CFMX Enterprise traditional installation to a real J2EE solution.

Also many new features and fixes in CFMX 6.1, aka RedSky. Here’s my views on those.
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I just finished upgrading our server to ColdFusion 6.1 (aka redsky). I had some issues during the update process and realized it was because I always ran the ColdFusion services under their own account that has somewhat restricted access (by default they run under the system account). If you are upgrading a windows server make sure you change the account to your administrator/system account before the update and switch it back afterwards.

Well the server is happy now