"Does anyone have an opinion on Adobe Coldfusion?"

Posted At : July 2, 2009 11:08 PM | Posted By : Jamie Krug
Related Categories: CFML, ColdFusion, Railo

A (very) brief list of ColdFusion/CFML resource links in response to Tweet from @ryanmaurodesign: "Does anyone have an opinion on Adobe Coldfusion?"

The short answer: yes :) There is a vibrant CFML community and many will be excited to tell you why it's so fantastic!

Adobe ColdFusion Evangelism Kit

Other major (open source and free) CFML engines:
Open BlueDragon
Railo

CFML Advisory Committee

ColdFusion is a Java EE application... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldfusion#ColdFusion_and_Java

Just a few of the very many busy bloggers:
Ben Forta
Ben Nadel
Charlie Arehart
Hal Helms
Ray Camden
Sean Corfield

...and a bunch more ;-)
http://coldfusionbloggers.org/

A bunch of open source ColdFusion apps (as well as other Adobe RIA related stuff):
RIAForge

Popular MVC frameworks (there are more):
ColdBox
Fusebox
Mach-II
Model-Glue

Other popular frameworks (there are more):
ColdSpring ("Spring framework for ColdFusion")
Reactor (ORM)
Transfer ORM

There's a ton of other great information out there, so go check it out! (Ignore the occasional/ignorant "ColdFusion is dead" nonsense that somehow still creeps up from time to time, despite continued growth!:)

Comments (12) | 10312 Views
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Tad Reeves's Gravatar Question: I'm pretty new to ColdFusion, but am more experienced running J2EE type boxes. I'm trying to set up a ColdFusion dev server on a VM with limited memory, and I'm trying to trim it back so that it doesn't pork out and use every bit of memory on any computer within a 10 mile radius. I.e. trying to get it so that it perhaps doesn't fire up all of the Flash remoting servlets or other things I don't need for basic CF functionality, in hopes that this might trim back the RAM usage. Any help you might be able to be on this?
# Posted By Tad Reeves | 7/2/09 11:46 PM
Sean Corfield's Gravatar @Tad, you might look at Railo (or OpenBD). They are free open source CFML engines that run on any JEE server and both have a much smaller memory footprint than the Adobe CFML engine.
# Posted By Sean Corfield | 7/3/09 12:46 AM
Tad Reeves's Gravatar Thanks -- I'll check that out. The functionality that I'm looking to get is relatively limited -- but needs to at least work similarly to the Adobe CFML engine. I'm just trying to dynamically generate a KML file with CF -- so as long as it also maintains the ability to add other mappings than .cfml, etc, I'm in good shape.
# Posted By Tad Reeves | 7/3/09 1:49 AM
Tad Reeves's Gravatar Just took a cursory look at it. Cool -- it runs on Resin! That's the sort of fast/light approach I was looking for. :)
# Posted By Tad Reeves | 7/3/09 2:17 AM
Gert Franz's Gravatar @Tad: And you can use it with Resin out of the box. Just have a look here:
http://www.railo.ch/blog/index.cfm/2009/6/30/Railo...

Gert Franz
Railo Technologies, Switzerland
# Posted By Gert Franz | 7/3/09 2:37 AM
Jamie Krug's Gravatar @Tad, looks like you've got some fine tips already from Sean and Gert, but I'll throw out there that I've had great performance with Railo on Tomcat. You can also of course tinker with the JVM config settings to tweak the memory allocation and see what works for your setup. Here's an overview of my Ubuntu/Apache/Tomcat/Railo setup: http://bit.ly/HDyKQ
# Posted By Jamie Krug | 7/3/09 10:36 AM
Tad Reeves's Gravatar You guys have been an outstanding help so far. I really appreciate it.

I was able to get Railo up and running on my little VM linux box, using the default Resin setup. I'm familiar with both Resin and Tomcat, but Resin runs a little leaner and I need all the RAM I can on this little thing. But it works now, and serves up CF, and I was able to set it up with a datasource and get rolling no problem.

Next question is this: I'm trying to dynamically generate a KML file for a Bing Maps project I'm working on. On most J2EE servers, you can just edit the servlet-mapping in web.xml and tell it to pipe other file extensions through the CF rendering engine. Is there something similar on Railo? It definitely doesn't have a bone stock web.xml, so I figured I'd ask.
# Posted By Tad Reeves | 7/3/09 6:52 PM
Sean Corfield's Gravatar @Tad, open up {resin}/conf/app-default.xml and look for the servlet-mapping tags around lines 80-85.

Duplicate the *.cfm one and change the extension.

Now Resin/Railo will serve up those requests.

I just tried it with *.pqr and a test.pqr file on disk was treated just like a CFML file.
# Posted By Sean Corfield | 7/3/09 7:19 PM
Tad Reeves's Gravatar You guys are awesome.

Worked like a charm. Thanks a bunch.
# Posted By Tad Reeves | 7/3/09 7:31 PM
Tad Reeves's Gravatar OK - since you guys are the best, I figured I might give you a whirl on this as a potentially only-Microsoft issue, potentially an issue with how Railo is serving up pages.

Check this link:
http://blog.reevestech.net/2009/07/using-bing-maps...

When I serve up a KML file statically through Resin, things work. If I pass it through the Railo CF servelet, it breaks. Same file. Would really, really appreciate anything you have to say on this!
# Posted By Tad Reeves | 7/3/09 8:40 PM
Sean Corfield's Gravatar Two things to look at:

1) the length when rendered via Resin is much bigger so you need to see why that is.

2) the Resin generated download has text/html as the content type which is probably wrong so use cfheader to set the correct value.
# Posted By Sean Corfield | 7/3/09 9:16 PM
Tad Reeves's Gravatar Sean - thanks for this. On the difference in size, I can only imagine that there's something odd happening with the whitespace or something like that -- as I can't detect a difference in what's being served back.

In terms of the content-type, I'm setting that with <cfcontent type="text/xml">, and have tried a few different mime types, and that doesn't seem to do it. I noticed there's no etag when going through the CF servlet, so that may have something to do with it too.

I'm posting like crazy on the MS forums, as it seems to be something whack and not very well-documented on MS's side, as Railo seems to be doing its thing just fine.
# Posted By Tad Reeves | 7/4/09 12:27 PM
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