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!

In anticipation of Firefox 3’s release on a day TBD, Mozilla’s marketing team has created Download Day- Firefox 3’s 1,440-minute quest to make the Guinness Book of World Records for being the most downloaded software ever in one day. Download Day has a website, http://www.spreadfirefox.com/, created to spread the word and entice Firefox luverz across the globe to literally pledge their allegiance to Download Day. By clicking the “Pledge Now!” button, you increase your country’s number of pledges on a Google-Maps-esque world map. The cool part of the Download Day site is if you hold your mouse over a country on the map, you can view the aggregate number of pledges from that country.

Close to 175,000 of us Americans have given their pledges, while our friendly neighbors to the North have 30,000 on board (Good work Canada! You’re super!). How many people in Myanmar have pledged, you ask? Go see for yourself.

With already over a million pledges worldwide, Mozilla seems to be on track to grab the record, with potential to earn legendary status like Guinness Record Holders Jackie Bibby (most rattlesnakes held in mouth by their tails, 10, as well as three other rattlesnake-related records) and Niek Vermeulen (largest airplane barf bag collection- over 3,700). If you haven’t already, go make your pledge and become a part of history.

UPDATE: Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday next week (June 17).

The hunt for alternative fuels is heating up, with corn-based ethanol seemingly the front runner to replace oil. Mexican farmers are even destroying fields of the rare Blue Agave cactus, which is used to make premium Tequila, in favor of planting corn.

However, there is another crop that can be grown easier and yield more ethanol per acre — grass. Specifically Switchgrass, nature’s shag carpet. This native US crop grows in tall bunches all over the country, and needs very little fertilizer.

With a high ratio of energy in vs. energy out, and carbon dioxide absorbing properties, Switchgrass could be the energy of the future. It has my vote, the last thing I want to see is Tequila prices skyrocket.

If you’re not already familiar with the infamous scene involving one bro, one John Kerry, and a gang of taser-wielding campus police, check out the video — and listen closely for the quote of the year. (Note: if you’re squeamish, skip it.)

I’m not sure how the Quote Patrol decides which quote is “most memorable,” but no doubt it has something to do with being one of the top quote queries on Google and one of the most popular videos on the web. And now it’s official: “Don’t tase me, bro!” has become the most memorable quote of the year according to the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.

What makes the video and quote so popular? It’s that special somethin’ — the word “bro.”

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Poor Microsoft. They’re so desperate to get a better grip on the search market that they’re paying people to use their engine. It’s called the Live Search Trial Program. Yup – Microsoft’s new big bad search strategy isn’t a new algorithm or a better user interface. Instead, Microsoft is bribing you with prizes.

Nice try, Microsoft. I might have given your engine a little love just to win a prize, but I can’t even figure out how to participate in the program. Do I have to be a Hotmail user?

I’d rather try Blingo, powered by Google’s search engine (although Google’s universal search features are somewhat depreciated in Blingo’s interface). For 25 searches a day, you are automatically entered to win a prize on Blingo. When you refer your friends, any prize they win, you win as well.

Feel free to be one of my friends….

Through November 26, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) will be handing out two XO laptops per donation – one to a child in a developing country, and one to a child of your choice. The program is called Give 1, Get 1.

Who can resist when Masi Oka is the spokesman?

Additionally, T-Mobile is rewarding donors with one year of HotSpot access, available in about 8,500 locations in the U.S., such as Starbucks, Borders, airports, and Amtrak stations.

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Sick of the current real estate trends? It might be time to turn your eye to the virtual real estate market of Second Life.

For those of you unfamiliar with Second Life, it isn’t a game, per se. It’s an online virtual universe where you can live out an alternate fantasy life — a virtual online universe with millions of registered users.

Meet one of Second Life’s richest land barons, Anshe Chung:

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Finally. The New York Times Online will no longer require readers to subscribe to most of its content.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve googled for some news story and clicked on a promising result from the NYT Online, only to have to have my way barred by “you must be registered to view this article” or some such similar nonsense.

Under the old system, readers had to pay roughly 50 bucks a year to get their dose of the NYT online. Now they will only charge for a selection of archives between 1923 and 1986.

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