Just a quick post to say that the long awaited Railo 3.1 dropped today, meaning we now have a full blown contender in the CFML engine market to compete against Adobe’s ColdFusion. If you haven’t already, go get Railo 3.1 from here.

And Barry? Well, Barry appears to be a mountain rescue dog from Switzerland, the home of Railo. It’s a pretty inventive name for a dog and obviously means enough to the guys at Railo that he’s mentioned in the server scope.

Once I’ve had a chance to look at Railo more I’ll probably blog about it, especially when I am in more of a position to compare it to the upcoming ColdFusion 9.

It will be interesting to see who moves completely over to Railo in the next few weeks – it’s definitely shaken things up a bit.

Bookmark It

Railo goes Open Source on JBoss.org

“Swiss software company Railo announced today plans to release an open source version of the Railo CFML engine hosted at JBoss.org, the website of the leading provider of open source Java middleware. This will provide developers with a top-quality CFML engine available for free under the LGPL license. The open source version of Railo will be launched in late 2008, and will be available for download from the JBoss.org community website.

“JBoss has been a driving force behind the Open Source ecosystem built around the Java platform and in legitimizing Open Source Java middleware in the Enterprise”, said Gert Franz, CEO of Railo, “and we believe that having JBoss.org as a community partner will dramatically increase the adoption and use of CFML in the enterprise market”.

CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) is a programming language that allows for rapid creation of high performance, scalable web applications. Railo is a CFML engine that converts CFML code into executable Java byte code which can be deployed and run on any standard Java Servlet engine. This provides programmers the productivity gains of CFML development with the performance and scalability of the Java server environment.

As part of the partnership with Railo, the JBoss.org community will be working on several enhancements to provide CFML developers tag-based access to JBoss core functionalities, including JBoss Cache and Messaging.

Sacha Labourey, CTO at JBoss added: “The JBoss.org community has repeatedly proven to be a powerful launch-pad for propelling exciting and innovative technologies into mainstream adoption”.

In the following days they will build their websites with all the information about the 3.0 and 3.1 release. In addition their blog will aggregated on www.jboss.org/railo/blog. If you like to have a look at the video from the keynote, here you can see it again.

Bring it on.

Bookmark It

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.

Bookmark It

As of tomorrow, Railo 3.1 is an open source product as announced today by Gert Franz from Railo at Scotch on the Rocks 2008.  Hosted by JBoss.org, the product will be supported by a much larger community than can be provided purely by the CFML community.

So, now we are left with only two cost-option CFML engines, Bluedragon and Adobe’s ColdFusion 8.  Everything else is now open-source : OpenBD, Railo (excluding Enteprise) and Smith.

I dare say more information will appear as time goes on (the keynote is still in progress)

In the meantime, please look here

Bookmark It