As you know from a previous post, i've been looking at the possibilities of setting up a cheap CF enviroment. What I didn't mention is Railo. I remember hearing about this probably a year plus ago, and Gert Franz (Railo core developer) reminded me on the HoF again.
Well what can i say. Its shocked me a little. I've been using the Railix version which "is a fully installed and configured version that can be used instantly. This version contains a fully functional Java Server (Jetty). You can use Railo without having installed any Webservers. " To set this up all i had to do was unzip the downloaded file to c:\\railo\\ and run start.bat. From there it was all ready to go at http://127.0.0.1:8888/.
The first thing i did was fire up the Model Glue Samples, they worked fine. They actually worked better than Adobes CF server and caught a spelling typeo in one of the Message.cfc's. I fired up one of my little test MG apps, that worked fine, then i hit a snag - I hadn't setup my DSN's. This has been my only draw back at the moment. I can't seem to set up my MYSQL datasources and have settled for an ODBC-JDBC bridge. That said and done the performance is still amazing.
As you can see i've liked it. Im going to carry on playing around with it, and if you are looking for a cheaper alternative now that BD licence has changed check it out. You can view the compatibility list out here, and any feature missing you can vote in.
Gert has also mentioned on the HoF list that.
"We will release Railo in the next couple of Weeks. Railo Supports Fusebox up to 4.1, Mach II
and Model Glue Frameworks. Some CMS already have been testedsucessfully.
Pricing looks something like this:
Developer, Community Version is free. (No CFX, No Search, 1 Datasource per Web)
Professional Version 200€ including one Web. Every further web 100€
Enterprise Version 1600€ unlimited webs. "