Daniel Rosewarne
Technical Director
Store74 Ltd
http://www.store74.com/
At Store74 we provide retail software, specializing in t-shirt production. We own not only a best of breed e-commerce store, but also the production software for use within garment production facilities.
Crucially, between both pieces of software we have an advanced rules engine that looks at each product on each order individually to work out the most appropriate fulfillment partner to send it to. To the consumer, it appears as if a single supplier has fulfilled their order.
In addition our Production Manager back-end system (which is available to our t-shirt production partners in the UK) we have an online store called Jumperlumps, which runs on our software platform. Both systems have recently been migrated from using ColdFusion 8 in a live environment to using Railo 3.1 on a UK based VPS.
There is a wide and varied level of experience within the team with over 10 years of working with CFML on a number of large-scale projects. Amongst others, previous clients have including Xerox and Oxfam and projects have spanned CMS, CRM, e-commerce and intranet solutions.
We have worked with ColdFusion for many years and have been very pleased with the speed in which we can develop software and the structured approaches we can take. However, as with a lot of software houses, the licensing costs were always prescriptively expensive for our live environment. Especially when additionally planning our development and test environments. We developed from version 3.0, but are now live using the official release version of 3.1. We’re using Fusebox 5.5 which appears to run extremely efficiently.
The combination of the phenomenal increase in speed and the open source nature of Railo has allowed us to move from a shared host to our own dedicated servers, to move from the US to the UK for hosting and allowed us to scale up our development and test environments (including the use of Cruise Control for continuous integration and testing) allowing us to be far more efficient in the way that we work.
In the majority of cases, the transition from ColdFusion to Railo was very simple. The areas we had issues with were in three distinct camps. First, features not supported in Railo. Thankfully, with such great compatibility, this wasn’t an issue for us outside of code encryption and Flashpaper support, both of which we have found workarounds for. Second, bugs in our own code which the rather more forgiving ColdFusion server had let slide. This gave us a good opportunity to tidy things up a little and in many areas, refine the software.
Because of the lack of a major organisation supporting Railo, as you would get with Adobe, the documentation in the early days hasn’t been as comprehensive as one would have hoped. However I’m sure this will change with the software being open source along with the recent additions of Mark Drew and Sean Corfield to the team.
If we had a wish for Railo 4.0, We use background tasks a lot, it would be useful to be able to not only see failures in the task list within the Railo administrator, but also to be able to send back status messages. For example, if you had a batch process to send out emails, you could have it running in the background and then visit the Railo administrator to see it’s progress.
If I were to often any advice for newcomers I would say that it’s probably not going to be as tough as you think! The best approach is to set up a server, port your code over and give it a try, the migration is likely to be a simple process.