Justin Lewis
Sr. Web Developer
Gamepro Media
http://api.gamepro.com/

We built a RESTful video game content API. Users who wish to program video game content can access it in different ways. We have standard RSS, embedded widgets, embedded video search, embedded screenshot gallery builder, GUI rest url selector and access to all service methods. The application is a custom CFML MVC framework that runs on Railo 3.1 / Resin through Apache 2 with a MySql backend. We integrated wordpress and vanilla forums for documentation and support and all apps share session / login state.

Content Offerings:

  •  Editorial Content
    •  Video Game based articles
    •  Video Game videos
    •  Art and Screenshots
  •  Product Information
    •  Video Game product information related to content and media
    •  Release Date calendar
    •  Top picks


We have been working with CFML since coldfusion 4, all Gamepro Media apps have been built using CF. We have limited Java experience although we know how to manage the JVM and access underlying Java methods if need be.

We heard about Railo from our friends at gamestar.de. We have been working with Railo for about 6 months. When Railo 3.1 was announced as Open Source, We loved it. I think it's the right move. What Adobe needs to understand is it's not about shipping units, it's about market penetration. If people stop using your product then there are less jobs for developers thus more teams drop it and the Cycle continues.

We love the speed and memory management of Railo. This API was built from the ground up with Railo. We haven't changed our other apps over yet, there are still a few things that Railo / ColdFusion do differently and we haven't gone and patched our other apps to account for it. ( Client Variables I'm looking at you!)

A technical hurdle we overcame with Railo was that ColdFusion 8 is not so good at parsing XML objects with any kind of speed or memory management. We were able to use persistent scope variables for some runtime DAO finally.

The speed of execution and footprint of Railo stands out for us. Our custom framework starts up and runs about 5 times faster on Railo. I would like to see better legacy support for existing CF apps, perhaps a code analyzer that checks for problems.

Long term, we would like to move all of our apps to Railo.

The disadvantage to coming into Railo is the lack of complete documentation.

For someone new, our advice would be to take the time to learn the differences and you will be happy.