CFSearch.com is an old CF project of mine that has been festering unloved for a few years. The original site was built back in 1999 and was a ColdFusion directory/search engine type thing allowing users to register their site, product or service and allow it to be searched on. I have barely touched it since then. I kept meaning to build a new site but never got round to it, so I eventually just turned it into a google adwords site.

Recently I decided to revive the project using Google's custom search engine technology which does most of the hard work for you, I still need to extract and verify a lot of the sites from the old database as many of them are probably dead by now, but the system is up and running and has enough data in it to be useful and usable. I have kept it very minimilist (google style) for now, but will add more features over time.

So if you run a CFML related site or blog, have written some cf open source software or sell any CF related products or services then please pop over to cfsearch.com and submit your site.

I have just published a new page on the site comparing Railo with ColdFusion, features, performance and Pros/Cons.

If you are writing apps that need to work on Both CF and Railo or you are considering migrating from CF to Railo then you will hopefully find this useful. It is a work in progress and will be continually updated so please feel free to add your comments to the pages if I have missed anything.

Probably the biggest advantage with ColdFusion is the simple installer and the way it hides all the complexities of JRUN and Java from you and most of the time just works right out of the big. One of the simplicities of which is requiring you to only create a web site on the web server and it just works. With Railo it is more complex as you also need to add a host entry to the servlet container (railo, Tomcat, Jboss etc).

Thankfully with Railo this extra step can be avoided as well with a simple regular expression that effectively generates the host entry on the fly. This does however only work on Resin, so if you are using another servlet container I think you are out of luck, but I'm not expert so don't take my word for it, check the docs or ask on the relevant forums if you can use a regex in the host entry.

The following single host entry is what I am using on cfmldeveloper.com for the free hosting and simply requires that you stick to a standardised directory format for the home directory of all your sites.

This example presume all the sites are located at

d:\wwwoot\[domain name]\wwwroot

You can of course modify it for your own requirements.

The regex also strips the www from the domain name before evaluating it so that this is not used in the path name. Without this it would evaluate www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com as different paths.

<host regexp="(?:www\.)?(.+)">

 <host-name>${host.regexp[1]}</host-name>

 <root-directory>D:/wwwroot/${host.regexp[1]}</root-directory>

 <web-app id="/" root-directory="wwwroot">

 <!-- enable/disable directory browsing -->

 <servlet servlet-name="directory" servlet-class="com.caucho.servlets.DirectoryServlet"/>

 </web-app>

</host>

I just did a Railo/Tomcat install on an IIS7 server and thought the whole thing was hosed as I could only get a 500 internal server error. It turns out that Railo errors will not be displayed by default unless you are browsing the site on the actual server as IIS7 hides the errors. Now I knew it did this for asp.net errors, but it doesn't do it for ColdFusion errors so I'm not sure why it is hiding Railo errors, but here is the solution none the less for anyone else who may be tugging their hair out over this issue.

Read more...

As of today, Railo hosting is now also available for FREE at CFMLdeveloper.com. If you already have an account then you can enable Railo easily, please refer to the FAQ for instructions. Please note that the £1 SETUP fee still applies for all new packages, but is still a one-time fee for fraud validation purposes and your developer hosting is then FREE forever. 

If you do not yet have an account then simply SIGNUP from the hosting page.

Please don't forget to check the Hosting support pages if you get stuck, most common questions can be found there.