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Tutorials: Railo for web site development
by Solida Martin

I came across a new product, Railo, that has me thinking potential. But first, being that I am a closet Trekkie, I have to point out that Rhylo is the name of an alien dog in the Star Trek television series Enterprise. Through a round about way and apparently German translations it became Railo. How hmm! but any reference to Star Trek is fine with me. So anyway's, it is actually pronounced Rhylo.

Its not often that I embrace a new web developement technology or software because there are so many "next things" being created or reinvented that nobody can keep up with them all. I think Railo has the potential to stick and is worthy of taking a good test drive. The last time I was this excited was when I discovered how much easier life could be for a web designer when using JQuery.

So what is Railo? Well its an open source Coldfusion Markup Language engine. Huh? well, it basically takes the place of the expensive Adobe Coldfusion server software. I have always loved Coldfusion because you can develop powerful, robust applications in a fraction of the time. Now, we have Railo that is not only is is open source and FREE but it is supposed to be much faster than Adobe Coldfusion. One knock on open source software is that there is no company to stand behind its product. Well, this company does stand behind its product and offers support and enterprise editions. I have noticed some pros and cons with Railo already, but so far the main con is that it doesn't support every single Coldfusion tag. For example, it doesn't support the tag cftextarea and the tag cfform doesn't support preservedata. I would miss these however there are easy workarounds and Railo does have some added features. Railo says it is actually more secure because every site runs in its own context and is sand boxed. By doing this, each site has its own web admin to control the sites settings. That's pretty cool! You can do this with Coldfusion's Enterprise edition but at a nice $3,000 Plus price tag.

Really, the thing that has me so excited is that Railo will be able to be offered to clients who's budget cant afford to run a dedicated Coldfusion server and/or who's web sites shouldnt be published in a shared hosting environment.

So here in starts Studio Martin's Railo journey. Please feel free to share your opinions about Railo with us. We would love to hear about your experiences.