Zen Planner is an online billing service and membership management platform for martial arts schools, gyms, yoga studios, and music / dance schools. We help great instructors to teach more students more effectively. Visit us at http://www.zenplanner.com
Zen Planner was coded by Ben Pate, a veteran software developer with experience in web application development going back to ColdFusion 3.0. In four years of full-time development, Zen Planner has evolved into a complex, mission critical application that contains hundreds of thousands of lines of custom code.
We've been using Railo for about 1 year, when we moved from a single VPS host to a dedicated, cloud-based infrastructure.
Railo 3.1 was a watershed moment for the ColdFusion community. For all of its power and simplicity, CFML has historically lost the mindshare battles agains other "free" or "open source" development environments. With Railo 3.1, businesses have a new, more productive "open source" option for creating web applications. This gives new developers a reason to try CFML for their projects, in addition to encouraging existing ColdFusion teams a reason to stay with CFML.
The transition from Adobe ColdFusion to Railo was astonishingly easy. We only had to make minor, obvious changes to our code in order to port. For example, we remove definitions for a few of our custom function that Railo has embedded into the language itself. This was another indication for us that the Railo team is advancing the CFML platform in the same direction that we're looking for it to go.
As our business has grown, we needed to scale from a single VPS to a clustered server infrastructure. The Railo consulting team was great at recommending a solution and then following through with a ready-to-run clustered environment.
We faced a tough choice in moving to a cloud hosting environment. We needed the redundancy and flexibility offered by cloud hosting, but software licensing costs would completely preclude us from making the switch. Using Railo, we migrated our billing software to the new hosting environment at significantly lower costs.
The speed of this server is wonderful, and there are little gems throughout the language where Railo has enhanced CFML in ways that should always have been there. We're now moving to implement more Railo-only features, such as the robust caching architecture.
We use a proprietary ORM framework that migrated to Railo flawlessly, without modification.
We needed an open source engine for our CFML application that we could use on cloud-based servers. We were impressed by the speed and feature set of Railo, particularly the resources and caching enhancements to the environment.
We were concerned about bugs and lack of support from an open source application server, but were pleasantly surprised that neither of these was a problem. Support has been excellent through the community and through the paid professional services.
We have encountered bugs, but these are addressed and closed by the Railo team quickly.
We ported a very large, complex, mission critical application from ColdFusion to Railo with very little effort and virtually no retraining. This enabled us to direct more of our small technology budget to firing up more servers instead of buying more software licenses.