Railo 3.0 Review

OK, so now that the dust has settled and everyone has had the oppourtunity to take a good look at what has been going on with the open sourcing of Railo (and we’ve had a chance to talk to Gert Franz about it) let’s review some of the facts:

1. Railo is now a LGPL2 licensed projectThis was one of the bad bits about OpenBD. OpenBD is a GPLv3 license, which basically means that if you want to distribute your code with OpenBD, you must also be running against a GPLv3 license – not good for distributing your CFML apps with a built in engine. Railo is a LGPL2 license which essentially means you can do whatever the hell you want with Railo. You can bundle it with whatever other licenses you want. It’s helluva lot more flexible.


2. Railo has a load of new featuresSee below for the new features


3. Railo Enteprise will not intially be OSS due to some of the software contained withinGert Franz of Railo was saying during his presentation that they intend Railo to be fully OSS, and once they have got round the licensing issues with tags such as CFVIDEO, that too will be fully OSS


4. Railo is now a fully fledged part of the jBoss.org community.This means that there is a big brother looking after it, and it’s a considerable one. JBoss.org is a massive amount of tools with a very large and vibrant Java community (for instance, there were around 8 million downloads of JBoss AS last year alone). This puts Railo not in a nice safe environment, but also puts it into a position whereby it can be seen by a whole load more people, which can only be good for CFML.

This morning, I grabbed my copy of Railo and gave it a quick look. Installation was a piece of cake (it comes as a Jetty install), and things ran first time and worked perfectly. I used the nice admin interface (a feature missing from OpenBD) and deployed the Feed-Squirrel.com codebase onto it. A couple of minor tweaks later, and it was running fine. It fact, it was runing better than I’ve ever seen it run on ColdFusion 8

So, to summarize what’s the headlines in Railo 3.0? Well, in short, the following:

• Amazon S3 resource


• Cluster Scope


• Instance synchronization


• Spooler with frontend in the admin for mail, thread-tasks, instance synchronization


• Definition of constants in the Railo XML

There are also a few new tags:

• cfapplication (attribute mappings, customtags)


• cfdbInfo (type users)


• cffunction (returnformat=“serialize”)


• cfhttp (addtoken = yes)


• cfthread (attribute type, retryinterval)


• cfvideo


• cfvideoPlayer


• cfvideoPlayerParam

Once the public drop is made, whenever that may be, download it, take a look and see what Railo can do for you. If you’re considering purchasing some CF8 licenses – hold off on that until you’ve given it a look – it could save you a fortune.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 06 Jun 2008