As an organisation, PartsSparesEtc aims to offer the customer the opportunity to sell and buy second hand parts from the Plastic Industry that would of possibly ended up in the bin! We give the owner an opportunity to recycle unwanted components by selling them on for a financial gain instead of filling land fields.
The site is currently maintained and developed by a single CF Developer who has worked with ColdFusion since 4.5, and used with the majority of frameworks out there from Fusebox 2 up to and include Model-Glue 3. He started looking at Railo very early on, before it was even version 1 as a cheaper hosting solution for some smaller sites. When Railo announced it was going to be apart of the JBoss project and go open source at 3.1 we thought excellent, the announcement makes it a wonderful time to be a CF developer with a team focused on delivering a product for the community.
The choice to use Railo was simple, first price, second speed, and third tiny footprint. Using Railo over the Adobe's product has been a smooth process with no technical hurdles getting in the way of development. What we have noticed is that the three frameworks the site currently uses (ColdSpring, Model Glue 3, Transfer ORM) run significantly faster over CF8 in our tests. The current configuration is Linux/Apache/Resin/Railo which was quick and painless to setup and has put Railo in the primary role in PartsSparesEtc.com business architecture with the site being built from the ground up on version 3.1, originally using the beta release in the early stages and has been upgrading with ever since to the now stable build.
Along with the speed gains Railo has some nice features but the ones which have been most handy are the small ones, its (not in order they are): implicit structure, ternary operator, and var'ing anywhere in a CFFUNCTION. The first two cuts down on so much code over the course of an application though there are some two features that we would like to see in a future release:
- Hibernate Intergration. Any help in not writing SQL is always nice.
- Though handling that kind of code would be best done via CFSCRIPT
To anyone looking in to using Railo as there CFML server we would say embrace it as soon as possible. We could go on about the tiny footprint, speed increases, per site administrator, and price but the best way is to download the express version and start running your code.