First thoughts on Railo

Apr 16, 2009

With all the great news surrounding the Railo project I figure I take a moment and give it a quick trial run. My local environment is Fedora so naturally I downloaded the linux tar.gz version and unzip it in my /opt directory. The total size of the download was only 64MB which is great. The start script didn't work at first, just a couple of ^M where the line breaks would normally be, a simple encoding issue easily fixed. The admin pages are very simple and easy to follow. You can't load up C++ based CFX tags. Not a big deal since they are dying off anyway. Sandboxing or resource security doesn't appear to be in Railo yet either.

I tried a couple of apps. The first was BlogCFC which the admin side worked fine but the frontend didn't. BlogCFC is supported on BlueDragon and ColdFusion, so it may be just a few things different about the Railo environment. Next I tried an internal jQuery / CFC based application that worked fine with just a small change. When calling a CFC the default return format is in WDDX. You can specify JSON in the URL to obtain a JSON formatted string instead. This doesn't happen with Railo currently. I had to change it via the attribute of the CFC  function which isn't my prefer method . I like to keep the remote methods agnostic so I can call them via Javascript, Flex, etc without changing the code. Not a hugh deal, but it would be nice to have that fixed.

All in all, Railo looks pretty good though. It's small and seems to run fast. There are differences, but they seem minor. I'll write more as I continue to explore.

 

 

 

Comments

Sean Corfield

Sean Corfield wrote on 04/16/097:50 PM

In Railo every web context has its own complete web administration console. The server administration console can set defaults for all web contexts and can specify what can be overridden in each web context. This is both more flexible and more secure: each web context can have its own data sources and full control over much of the engine's behavior without affecting other web contexts.
John Mason

John Mason wrote on 04/17/0910:01 AM

Ah, ok. I see now. Thanks. Yep, that is a very flexible and elegant way of handling the separation.

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