Chris Hayes
Lead Developer
http://linkm.in/
Linkmin is a URL shortening service, focused on providing easy to use APIs and reporting. With Linkmin the user experience is of the utmost importance, I am dedicated to keeping the site easy to use and developer-friendly. I welcome feedback and suggestions from end-users and developers alike to steer the product and build a better platform that everybody can leverage.
I've been a CFML developer for nearly a decade, predominantly on Adobe's platform. I began using Railo shortly after the open source release and have in the last six months converted to using Railo almost exclusively. I've been waiting for a feature-rich, fast, and open CFML engine for years. I was truly excited at the opportunities presented by using Railo vs. the other engines as it's speed and efficiency are far superior.
Railo's pure speed has enabled the Linkmin redirects to work so quickly as to be imperceptible to the end user. Linkmin uses a custom stripped down MVC framework built to be extremely lightweight, as speed with this app is everything. “Varing” a variable at any point really makes life a lot easier, additionally simple things like being able to dump and abort code easily from cfscript makes development with Railo a joy.
My transition to Railo couldn't have been easier. I actually far prefer Railo at this point; I find myself wanting a number of Railo's features in the competing CFML engines when I'm required to use them. Linkmin is currently Running on CentOS with Apache/Tomcat and a PostreSQL database, at this point I have the utmost confidence in the reliability and scalability of this platform.
Railo is faster, free, and more portable than any of the competitors. I can easily include the Railo runtime in my source directory and launch on any J2EE server. My only complaint thus far is the online documentation being a bit sparse.
My advice to new people looking at Railo, is to keep an open mind as some of the paradigms in configuring the server are a little different as compared to other CFML engines, and to lock down your variable scoping in the administrator console as it forces you to write better code.
In short moving to Railo has been a pleasure, it allows me to do what I want without expensive licensing and provides a speedy and stable platform for Linkmin and my other endeavors.