Jeff Gladnick
Lead Web Developer
http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/
GreatDentalWebsites.com is a CFML platform used to create websites for dentists. While most companies that create dental websites will use standard html, or simply copy their php program over and over again, we went with a different route. Every single site is loaded from the same model-glue/coldspring cfml application, enabling us to roll out changes to all of our customers at the same time. One code base to take care of, maintain, and backup.
Jeff Gladnick, who wrote the software, has worked with CFML for over 10 years since ColdFusion version 4.5 and has no java experience.
We were thrilled when Railo 3.1 Open Source was announced. We've developed several projects on Railo so we were pretty used to the architecture (having multiple admins, etc). There were a few "bugs" (in our code) that bluedragon jx was letting pass, but railo now caught - so those had to be fixed. There was also one minor bug that we found in railo, which was reported to the mailing list and dealt with promptly - I had a solution within a few hours of the post.
We're currently using Railo Open Source 3.1.2. For all other web development projects, Railo has been our preferred cfml engine since we first discovered it in 2006. Railo is now used by default unless we're specifically requested to use another cfml engine by the client, which almost never happens. For our server environment, we use Railo/Apache/Tomcat/Mysql manage by viviotech.net, a great cfml host.
A few years ago, we were actually in the very early stages of switching over to php, and probably would have continued had we not found Railo. For a small web dev shop, the costs of using cf are pretty steep. Because of this, we stayed in the community, kept going to conferences, stayed active in message boards and blogs, released a few small open source projects, and encouraged new people to use CFML. I really cannot stress this enough - without Railo, we would have been gone.
We'd been delaying video hosting for a while, waiting until our upgrade to use Railo's paid extension cfvideo. From our testing, Railo is more responsive, but we did upgrade from a dated version of BlueDragon, so its not really much of a comparison.
We have four hot items on our Railo 4.0 wishlist, and they're all related to configuring railo servers for production faster. They are:
- Error handling should be set to the public error message by default
- Web Context password enabled by default
- Zero DateTime behavior should be set by default to "convert to null"
- Perhaps a prompt during install to allow you to choose a "production" or "development" installation to make 1-3 unnecessary
Our advice to someone new using Railo is to be aware that there are occasionally some open source apps that don't work 100% out of the box, but it is always minor and easy to fix.