ColdFusion is officially open source; Railo eats BlueDragon; What about Adobe?
May 19th, 2009 : Shawn Grigson
As was recently announced, Railo, the open source CF engine, has finally given ColdFusion to the masses. March 31st saw the release of the first 3.1 public beta, providing full feature compliance with Adobe’s ColdFusion 8 standard, and allowing developers to begin porting over existing sites to Railo. The ability to port over existing sites, or to spin up entire servers for a client without running into the pesky licensing costs of ColdFusion is one of the developments that has me the most excited about Railo.
Previous versions of Railo (including the promising but ultimately not CF8-compliant and buggy 3.0) have been known to provide phenomenal speed increases, but without the ability to fully support the CF standard there have been compatibility issues with web software firms attempting to make a move to Railo. This, combined with a lack of true enterprise capabilities led many to dub the platform unready for prime time. Railo 3.1 is about to change all of that, at least once it is finally out of beta.
I have not yet had time to play with Railo 3.1 too much, but they provide an express install that isn’t really an install, so it has been very easy. Just extract to a folder, double click the ’start’ script to start the application/web server, and then you can immediately browse to it at http://localhost:8888. Drop code into the Railo webroot folder, and you can start testing existing apps against Railo. The administrator for Railo 3.0 was very sparse compared to the CF administrator that ColdFusion developers know and love. Not so with Railo 3.1. The server adminstrator which manages the more global settings has a separate password from the web administrator, and there are numerous settings available, many specifically tailored towards compatibility with CF8, but there are also enhancements beyond what Adobe provides. Additional enhanced selections within the administrator, such as “convert 0000-00-00 MySQL dates to NULL” seem like a sensible upgrade to the default behavior of CF, others probably depend on the needs of your application. Missing at this point in the release is the much ballyhooed cfvideo tag, a cluster scope (though Railo supports J2EE sessions at this point), and clustered caching. With a CF license costs no longer at issue, expect Railo’s clustering functionality to get a full workout in the coming months.
Installing extensions, and restarting the cf service are available within the administrator as well. Things like Galleon forums, the Mach-II framework, and other open source CF goodies. Additional providers can be added via the server, too, (this works very similarly to how plugin providers are added via the Eclipse IDE) and updating the server software is also possible within the Railo admin itself. One of the weirdest things for anyone that has restarted a ColdFusion service before is that Railo’s cf restart is darned-near instantaneous. Everyone gets logged out on the server, as sessions and other scopes are cleared, but other than that, there is no painful delay waiting for the service to kick in while site visitors are crashing into technical looking 500 server error screens as is so often the case with a typical ColdFusion restart. It’s…eerie. It is also a distinct improvement, but performance has always been Railo’s most promising and consistent offering in their platform.
You can bet that many people across the internets have been tinkering with Railo 3.1 lately, especially in tandem with Amazon’s EC2 or similar cloud service, in order to provide things like open source load-balanced J2EE session-scoped cluster farms. Suddenly, stunningly, ColdFusion developers are now enjoying something that PHP developers have been able to enjoy for years. I welcome an open CF8 standard (whether Adobe has created or simply joined the CF standard is unclear) and a fully-featured open source ColdFusion application server. It is clear that this can only mean good things for CFML and ColdFusion developers in the future.
What is not so clear, however, is how Railo’s other open source competitor Blue Dragon has fared, but with many members of the Blue Dragon team leaving (and some of them joining the Railo team), chances are that it will not fare very well. Equally unclear is Adobe’s opinion on Railo, and how its official release might come to affect its bottom line. Whatever the case, the cat is out of the bag now. We’ve seen the future, and the future is open source.
Viva la Revolucion!
Tags: Adobe, Amazon, Apps, ColdFusion, Development, Free_Resources, Hosting, news, Object-Oriented-Programming, Open-Source, products, technology, Web, Web-Applications
May 19th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Well I think its CFML now has open source engines as ColdFusion ( by Adobe ) is still not open source.
Great article and I’ll agree Railo is an excellent addition to the CFML space.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
To me, Railo is the best thing is, well, ColdFusion. I am a professional CF developer (along with other web technologies and languages), and indeed, especially today, smack dab in the middle of the Open Source Revolution, license fees for web frameworks should be a distant memory. With Railo, I am free and able to launch 30 servers in the Cloud, each running a super fast and reliable CFML engine, all using the free version of Railo. With Adobe’s license fees, that would cost our company upwards of $45,000, and $0.00 DOES NOT EQUAL $45,000.00. Of course when we are ready to start clustering our application servers, the Railo Enterprise solutions are more than 50% cheaper than obtaining and running as many Adobe ColdFusion licenses. Hailo Railo, TomCat, Geronimo and/or JBoss – the future of viable Enterprise CFML implementation. Keep these articles coming!!! Very informative and intriguing. Thanks – Marty McGee
December 14th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Now that Railo is at their final 3.1, I’m in complete agreement. Bear in mind, the new CF9 licensing (enterprise) allows for a single license to be used for up to 10 separate production servers, and all CF9 licenses include dev/staging licenses. This is a good move on Adobe’s part, though it’s still not as free (as in beer) as Railo.
Railo has also proven to be very stable, and also very fast, certainly a viable alternative. I’ve noticed I’ve had to make a few tweaks to Railo apps if I’m porting them over from CF8, but with the exception of certain frameworks like Transfer ORM, I have had no real compatibility issues.
December 14th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Thank you Shawn for your reply – I jumped out of my seat when I read your statement for CF9 Enterprise for use with up to 10 separate production servers. That is the best news I’ve heard so far about Adobe ColdFusion 9, non-technical of course. I am going to share this post with my development team. We’re a die hard ColdFusion house, with just about 10 servers needing a CF8-to-CF9 upgrade. Thanks again all.
Marty McGee
December 14th, 2009 at 11:03 am
This was where I originally found the mention of the licensing changes: http://www.terrenceryan.com/blog/post.cfm/coldfusion-9-eula-changes
I haven’t drilled down into the specifics yet, so I’d hate to quote you wrong, and there seems to be an expectation of licensing based on ‘cloud computing’, so I’m not sure if there’s a restriction on licenses for physical servers versus server instances, but I can’t really see a huge difference there, so hopefully Adobe doesn’t, either.