Railo 3.1 Is here!

Ok so today i downloaded the new Railo 3.1 open source beta release. Now I have been using Railo for testing for about a year now and have been waiting for this release for a while. I will be putting more info up as I get into working with it but to start off I must say I am happy with it. The features of Railo that I like, mostly the Administrator Console (Not like it was with OpenBD) are all there. Easy datasource creation including MySql, MSSQL and Oracle. It comes with the Apache Lucene search engine built into it. For those of you who are into Flex development, it has BlazeDS built in (though not fully at this time. Beta of course ). And the CMFL library is compatible with CF version 8. And it works very well, they are even working on a no brainer installer for Windows (hope they follow with Mac and Linux). All in all I believe Railo is a very good alternative for companies that can’t afford licensing for Adobes Coldfusion, and for hosting companies looking for an easy way to offer CF hosting to their customers at a lower cost.

On Organization….

One thing that has really become a major issue with me is the completely insane ways that some developers organize their code in a website. I have recently finished working with a website that actually had 96 files all sitting inside of the root folder. I’m sure there are others out there that have seen much worse but this is just my example. This makes it difficult to find things in the site structure and just really annoying in general. I was taught to use a basic site structure that I believe would do everyone some good to at least try to use to avoid having to deal with this headache later on. And it goes basically like this

1. create a few folders, i usually use cfcs, images, css, js, and dsp.

2. basically the only files that will exist in my root are the application.cfc and index.cfm files. Also any odd files such as analytics code and things like that could be left here but i will usually make an includes folder and put them in there. Everything else will go into the folders listed above. Dsp is used to hold display pages. You could break this down further to sections of your site as well to make things even more organized. All of my javascript files go of course in the js folder, and images etc.

A few extra seconds at the beginning of a project can save someone else headaches  and confusion down the road. Planning is key to a successful project. Hope this helps someone.

Free CF8 Hosting For Development or Established Business Websites

In case anyone doesn’t already know about this, freecoldfusionhosting.com is a site to get your free hosting account. It is provided by the same guys who bring us EasyCFM.com and is a really great way to test code for anyone who doesn’t have their own development server.

Why a padawan?

Well a few reasons actually. I guess mostly because I am new to this blogging thing. But it’s also a tribute to the guy who has helped me get to where I am today mainly by saving me in a crunch at work. Ray Camden the Coldfusion Jedi. I’ve only really been in this Coldfusion game for a few years now, and I have had the luck to meet some amazingly talented developers in that short time. I will probably talk about them from time to time but mainly this blog is about things that I come across in my daily journey in working with Coldfusion and the web in general. Why read this blog instead of the other hundreds out there? I guess because if you are new to this game like I am, you are probably looking for a place to find information for a project that you can use in the trenches so to speak. It’s been incredibly helpful for me to learn from the experience of others so this is a way for me to give back a bit. I will be gearing this blog to people at my level which is sometimes near the area of “what the heck do I do now” and sometimes “wow I think I just impressed myself”. So welcome to my journey. If anyone actually reads this, maybe we can all learn something useful along the way.