Entries tagged "Railo"
Railo is a high performance CFML engine.
Find out more at getrailo.org
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Lucee is the best CFML engine.
Nine years ago I began a blog article with a similar claim, and set out to
explain why Railo was at that time the best CFML engine. Well the simplest proof
of Lucee taking the crown is that Lucee is a fork of Railo by its original
creator, Michael Offner.
The thing that made Railo great and that Lucee will be taking further is in
being a CFML engine written for developers. That is to say, with features added
through developers saying "I need feature X to do my job better" - and
specifically not via vague ideas decided on by product managers getting
feedback from non-technical clients who say "we need to do mobile" and then
having a bunch of disconnected non-programmers come up with a horrendously buggy
and useless mess called cfclient. Eugh!
Good programmers already know what tools they need to achieve certain tasks,
and if those tools don't exist or aren't good enough, they need the ability to
create/improve them - that is what Micha gave us with Railo, and Lucee promises
to take this further - to make it even easier for the developer community to
adapt it to their needs.
Bering a fork, Lucee continues the versioning from Railo, launching tonight with
Lucee 4.5 available already, and an excellent Lucee 5 just around the corner.
Why Not Railo?
Many will be wondering why fork Railo, instead of working on what was there, and
the best way to answer that is simply to refer to what Brad Wood has already
written on the Railo mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/railo/B_1S3WzVPXY/hlIeZDE1u98J
To re-iterate the key points: this is the original Railo developer, taking the
Railo source code, and refreshing the project. Don't mistake for division what
is actually an inclusive evolution, and importantly: a sign of exciting things
to come!
Lucee 5
With the next release, Lucee will bring incredible flexibility to CFML and JVM
developers through a couple of key technologies.
OSGi is a modular platform for the JVM which allows only
the necessary libraries to be loaded. So if, for example, you don't use
Hibernate, it doesn't get included and wont add any overhead. Railo was already
lightweight, and Lucee with OSGi will take this even further.
JSR223 or
"Scripting for the Java Platform" is a standard for embedding different languages
on the JVM, and what this means is being able to use Lucee to write CFML in far
more places than before. A good example is Ant build scripts - doing certain
things with Ant can be awkward and convoluted and Lucee 5 will allow embedding
CFML which makes those same tasks trivial.
Together these bring some great opportunies, and this is only the beginning...
More Info
I've tried to avoid simply parrotting what others have already written, so to
get further details on Lucee's launch and future you should definitely check out
Mark Drew's blog post,
Adam Cameron's blog post,
the thread started by Igal on the Railo list,
and of course the official Lucee website: lucee.org.
It's been over two and a half years since my last "why railo" post, and -
despite Railo "only" being 0.3 versions on - there's
been a lot of improvements!
In fact, because it's been so long, a few of the things here are not new with
v3.3 (though they are all new since the previous article),
but are still great features that deserve mentioning!
Read on to find out what my ten favourite new feature are.
If you've ever looked at the CFML related articles on Wikipedia, you can't fail
to have noticed that, especially when compared to other programming articles,
they're not very good.
When somebody puts "coldfusion" or "cfml" into Google, they will almost
certainly see the respective Wikipedia pages amongst the top three results, but
when they follow those links they're unlikely to get a very good impression!
Not only could both these pages themselves benefit significantly from being
cleaned up and improved, but there are only a few frameworks and tools that even
have pages, and most of what does exist are very unencyclopaedic stubs. And this
doesn't even consider the generic programming pages that often don't even mention CFML.
Take a look at the CFML category page
- does that category contain everything you would expect an encyclopaedia to
cover about CFML? Check the pages for the frameworks you are familiar with - do
they go into the level of detail you would expect, and tell you everything you'd
want to know if you were entirely new to CFML?
If you agree that the CFML presence on Wikipedia can and should be improved,
and it's up to the CFML community to do it, then
read on to find out how you can help fix it.
The cfRegex project is two things. Firstly, it is a complete regex implementation
for CFML, providing more functionality, flexibility, features and power than the
existing CFML RE functions. Secondly, it is a drive to encourage people to
properly learn and make use of regex.
Regex is a very flexible language for matching patterns within text, and it has
the power to greatly simplify certain programming tasks. However, it can also be
intimidating to people not experienced with it.
This problem can be compounded by the relatively limited support for regex in
CFML, which often means code is written that is more complex than should be
necessary.
cfRegex helps to address both these problems. It provides a number of functions
and features that help to reduce the amount of code which programmers have to
write, whilst also helping to make their code clearer and easier to understand.
In addition, the project provides documentation, not just for its own features,
but also for regex itself, helping people to understand exactly what their
expressions are matching, and how to get the most out of regex.
Whilst cfRegex is still at a relatively early stage, it is currently usable, and
if you're a fan of regex it is certainly worth checking out.
It currently runs on CF 9.0.1, OpenBD 2.0, Railo 3.2 and later.
(Support for CF8 and others will be considered if enough people need it.)
The documentation should tell you everything you need to know about using it,
but if not then get it touch and say what's missing so it can be fixed!
If you get stuck, there's a mailing list where you can receive answers to any
problems or questions you have.
It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!
So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:
Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.
