Saturday 5 April 2014

I am one step closer to being unshackled from ColdFusion

G'day:
Note that that is ColdFusion, not CFML. I'm still onboard with CFML, and that's not likely to change in the mid-term. Today I switched all my hosted code from ColdFusion to Railo. So now my only connection to the Adobe product is my day job.

I have a few bits and pieces of code hosted with CFMLDeveloper, which is a bloody good CFML hosting service, and is for free for non-production code.

Russ really knows his stuff when it comes to CFML hosting. A good case in point is that to switch my hosted environment from ColdFusion to Railo, all I had to do is to update my web.config file (it's simply a copy and paste from a FAQ page), and my CFML environment was instantly running Railo instead of ColdFusion. That's pretty impressive.

There were a few code incompatibilities I needed to fix:

  1. I had a method which took an argument url, which conflicted with the URL scope.
  2. Railo's CFScriptable <cffeed> equivalent has different syntax to ColdFusion's.
  3. In some places I was using the full path to the ColdFusion CFCs, eg: com.adobe.coldfusion.Http, which obviously isn't valid on Railo.
  4. I was having problems with <cfcache> in Railo, so I cached some stuff by hand. I have not yet got to the bottom of this (quick update: this seems to be a bug: RAILO-3016).
It took me about one hour to find and iron out those.

Now I can leverage all the excellent improved language constructs in Railo that ColdFusion doesn't have yet. Plus my code runs faster. Plus because of the way Railo works, having a separate Server Admin and Web Admin, I even have access to the admin UI for configuring my Railo "instance".

Railo is - all round - just a better experience for me.

--
Adam