Will Jennings
Operations Director
Aidan Kane
Technical Director
http://www.photoswarm.com/
Photoswarm.com provides photo websites hosted with a personal yourname.com domain name and offers occasional, amateur & semi professional photographers alike a slick home to upload, share and display their photos. In addition to tight integration with social media, users can also create blogs and sell their images through our sites.
We have extensive experience with CFML, almost entirely the using the Adobe engine (with a little bit of BlueDragon). Started using it in 2001 and have developed numerous sites since. We use Java from time to time but generally only when forced to. We use various libraries for interfacing with things like memcached and we occasionally write things in Java but prefer to work within Coldfusion where possible.
We only switched to Railo recently (at the start of 2009) so we're still discovering all the amazing features that put it above the other engines. We were very very pleased with the announcement that Railo 3.1 was going to be Open Source. It's an amazing product and a huge contribution to the community. We haven't had to hack the core yet but do have the source code here to play with.
Transitioning to Railo was pretty straight forward. There were a few little gotchas. With cfexecute spaces in the arguments cause issues, variables in structs can't start with numbers (depending on the way you reference them) and cfqueryparams can behave slightly differently. Most of these were easy enough to work around and we've posted specific details on our blog to help out others who run into the same things.
The original build of photoswarm.com was done in php for cost reasons. Unfortunately we found that the code ran fairly slowly and development itself took longer. Our hope is that in the long-run Railo will scale better. The compatibility with the existing engines is a major advantage. It made the transitioning process incredibly painless. We are able to use take advantage of all of our legacy / existing code base.
Railo definitely has a primary role for us. We use an in-house framework (Simplify) for our development which is based on ruby on rails. The framework already ran blisteringly fast and since switching to Railo page load times have halved again. We intend on using it as the main platform for all of our systems. We use a version simple configuration for ease of integration with our existing systems. Apache is still used as the main webserver with all CF requests forwarded to Resin running on Java SE.
First and foremost it was the price. Having made the switch we can happily say that we'd recommend it as the superior engine at the same price of the others. There's simply more promising development coming out of Railo's headquarters than any other competing engine. Initially when we started using Railo there were a few niggles we had to sort to do with slight differences in the engines. But all and all these took no time at all and almost all of our code ran out of the box. There are no features that we're missing but a good many Railo ones (like native s3 integration) that we plan on taking advantage of in the future.
We would advise developers to try it out today. You can download and have it up and running in seconds for your own evaluation. You'll probably find that all of your existing code just works - and runs faster then it ever has before. Then you'll start to discover the innovative developments and extensions that currently put Railo at the top of the field.