Railo 3.0 Not just a Pretty Face

Last night at the Munich CFUG meeting I had the opportunity to meet Gert Franz and Michi Streit from Railo on the last leg of their Whirl Wind Railo World Tour.

They have really closed the gap to Adobe Coldfusion and provide almost all the same features as CF8 (with some exceptions in functions and tags). So while there are some limitations in the engine there are also some features which don't yet exist in the Adobe CF Engine.

One of the features of Railo 3.0 that I thought was really cool is in the Administrator. You can specify "Strict" for variable scoping. That means that if your variables aren't scoped you get a compiler error! No more laziness now you can force yourself to code better!

Another interesting feature is the addition of the Amazon S3 Resource. Resources were added to Railo 2.0. This means you can easily use Amazon S3 as an online mass storage solution, provided naturally that you have an S3 account.

The icing on the proverbial cake (at least for me) is the introduction of an Extension Framework. This means developers can create applications, publish the applications and per click of a button in the Administrator download and install the application into a web-context or server wide. Adobe could, for example, create the <cfreport> tag as an extension for Railo and offer it for sale.

Updates to Railo can be auto-discovered and with a click of the button the update can be downloaded and installed.

The guys are Railo are not just pretty faces, seriously, joking aside, not pretty faces, but they have managed to produce a really good CFML engine, that in my opinion makes them a viable player in the market especially now with the open source version being included in JBoss.

Speaking of JBoss if you would like to get involved in helping Railo 3.1 you can download the beta express version and issue any bugs you find directly to jira.