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!

Flashbelt 2009 is right around the corner. A truly exciting event where local flash designers and developers converge to see some amazing demo’s. A chance to learn what Adobe and flash masters are working on to push the boundaries and maximize the efficiencies of using flash in day-to-day work and play. The event is made up of both presentations and workshops and other events, and is appropriate for all experience levels.

Never been? Check out at least one presentation, you will undoubtedly go back for more. get yourself registered, space is limited.

Learn more about it and see who’s there this year.

Thanks to our friend Dave Schroeder at Pilotvibe, the founder and host

The numbers are in. I’ve thought about this thoroughly and in keeping with ArcStone’s nerdy roots, created an algorithm.  I added up productivity gains subtracted employee gripes and moans and then divided by hours logged.

(Gains – Gripes) / Hours = X

The clear winner for best technology investment in 2008?

Our switch to Google Apps for our company email, calendar and documentation platform.

Google Apps has five elements that you need to know about…

1. User Management – to secure access and set permissions for your team.
2. Email – in this case Gmail, which is Google’s fantastic web mail service.  Users can also use mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird if they wish.
3. Calendar – An online personal calendar which may be shared with your colleagues.
4. Sites - An easy to edit wiki system.  Need a quick wiki to organize a project, or documentation?  It literally takes a non-technical user 5 minutes to create a new site and start adding content.  You can then restrict content to certain users or publish to the web at large.
5. Docs – an online productivity suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and data collection application.   These have become very important tools in the tool box for us at ArcStone.  We use Docs for tracking basic spreadsheet information centrally like employee phone extensions and incoming leads, to collaborating on our 2009 business plan.  Google Docs also includes a slick form generation tool, enabling non-technical users to easily create online forms for surveys and similar data collection projects.  Google is clearly targeting Microsoft Office users, but I have to confess Google Docs still has a ways to go before replacing Office – don’t plan on using it exclusively.

And how much $$ for all these goodies?  If you have fewer than one hundred employees, the price is truly right. You pay them $0.  All it took for us was a DNS update so that Gmail started getting our our email and then some configuration / internal communication / training to make the transition.

Before you ask, no I’m not working for Google.  I just want to share something that’s working well for us.

If you’re an ArcStone client and you’re interested in making the transition to Google Apps, drop me a line.  If there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to schedule a group Webinar demonstrating how we use Google Apps and help you decide whether or not to make the move.

Ready for the new iPhone 3G to be released tomorrow? Maybe your happy with your current iphone, or you will be delaying your purchase to avoid the long lines and shoulder rubbing that will inevitably occur at every apple store. For those with the willpower to wait, you can indeed add a spark of new life to your current iPhone with some new apps.

The new iPhone Applications are now available and they can be acquired from the comfort of your lazyboy.

* The new iPhone 2.0 software is supposed to be out later today