ColdFusion or Railo ?
Not sure whether your ColdFusion application is compatible with Railo? worried about migration issues? Then hopefully the following comparison charts will aid you in your development.
Please note that this is intended to be a completely unbiased comparison to show the key differences in the CF engines to help develoeprs with compatibility or migration issues and is an ongoing work in progress, there is no claim or assertion that every possible difference or nuance is covered here, if somehting is missing or incorrect it wasn't done on purpose and you are free to use the comments section below to suggest changes and provide links to official docs where available. I will not approve flame baiting or argumentaive comments that do not contribute to this article. This is not a Railo vs ColdFusion competition or a popularity contest so please keep it nice and be objective.
If you wish to rant/disccuss/argue about whether ColdFusion is better than Railo or vice versa then please feel free to do so using getSatisfaction or the discussion list or facebook .
General Pros and Cons
- ColdFusion
- PRO: ColdFusion has been around a long time and is well support and tested
- PRO: Bucket loads of documentation and community resources
- PRO: ColdFusion has the might of Adobe behind it, a well known and large corporation.
- PRO: There are a lot more ColdFusion developers and hosts
- PRO: ColdFusion has a very simple click n go installer that works well most of the time and requires little technical knowledge to get it working
- PRO: Virtually all software and applications are going to work on ColdFusion by default
- PRO: ColdFusion Builder IDE has a lot of nice features that only work on ColdFusion
- PRO: Dweamweaver IDE, lots of cool features that will work only with ColdFusion
- PRO: Dreamweaver and CFbuilder, the official IDE's from Adobe that fully support and integrate with ColdFusion
- CON: ColdFusion can be expensive for small companies, hosts and consultants especially if you need the enterprise features
- CON: Coldfusion runs on JRUN out of the box. This is an old and no longer supported product (outside of CF) which has not been updated in a long time and is a bit behemoth compared to other Java Servelet containers.
- CON: As it is closed source you cannot modify the core CFML functionality or fix bugs. You must rely on Adobe for this.
- Railo
- PRO: Railo is FREE and open source.
- PRO: Railo Technologies may be a small and relatively new company, but the advantage of this is that you can actually speak to the people behind the product, get direct support and advice (like the old Allaire days)
- PRO: Bug fixes and patches are released much faster and you have direct access to Betas and Release Candidates.
- PRO: Because it is open source, you can easily add new features to the core CFML functionality or fix any bug yourself.
- PRO: Railo consumes far less system resources out of the box and will run on much lower spec servers as a result.
- PRO: Railo is more secure. Because every site runs in its own context it is sand boxed by default and each site has its own web admin interface to manage settings on a per site basis. To do this in ColdFusion you need to buy the Enterprise version and setup security sandboxes for every site via the global cfadmin.
- PRO: Most of the ColdFusion related resources, communities etc are just as applicable to Railo as they are to Coldfusion as you are still using the CFML language.
- PRO: Any Coldfusion developer can be a Railo developer as it is the same language, only a few new tags and functions to learn.
- PRO: Anyone can now afford to run your own Dedicated Railo server.
- PRO: The average simple web app/site will run on Railo with little or no changes.
- CON: Railo is not as easy to install and get running as ColdFusion and does require additional configuration for each site.
- CON: The Railo community is still small so getting Railo specific support may be an issue
- CON: Not many hosts doing Railo yet
- CON: Many off the shelf applications may not work on Railo
- CON: Not all of ColdFusion's features are supported, so migrating app's that use those features may take considerable work
- CON: No offical IDE. Although you can use Dreamweaver, CFBuilder, CFeclipse, you wont all the integrated features.
Speed/Performance Comparison
- Create X instances of a CFC and populate with data
- Create X instances of Arrays and populate with data
- Create X instances of Structure and populate with data
- Call the CFSET tag X number of times
- Debugging is turned of for all instances
- Looping through records to create Array of Value Objects is prime consideration.
This is a very basic speed test which I grabbed form another site and have since noticed it was tested on CF9 beta, so take it with a pinch a salt. I will be running my own tests using the latest versions once Railo 3.2 is officially released.
For a more detailed comparison please the following blog post by Jamie Krug
| Repetitions | Railo 3.1 | ColdFusion 8 | ColdFusion 9 |
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| 100 |
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| 10000 |
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| 100000 |
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Nov 4, 2010 at 2:01 AM With a few corrections, this could be a very helpful resource for those considering their options in CFML engines:
Regarding support: True, Adobe does charge to submit a support ticket through their support org (I challenge you to find any alternative that doesn't), but they are very involved in various lists, forums and via Twitter/Facebook--through these channels they provide ample support. The CF team is very helpful in reality, frequently addressing issues at no charge at all. So you most definitely *do* get support from Adobe at no charge. Oh, and installation support is always free.
Regarding JRun: JRun is no longer sold as an independent product, but it is still alive and actively being developed for the purpose of running ColdFusion. Bugs in JRun DO get fixed. My company runs an enterprise app in a cluster of CF servers on JRun and has never had a problem doing so that came back to JRun. CF also supports several other Java Servlet containers out of the box, so it's not actually that hard to get CF running on an alternative.
Regarding bug fixes and hotfixes:
I'm not sure what kind of timing you're comparing CF's bug fixes to, but in my experience Adobe has always been quick to fix bugs. If by "corporate machine" you mean adequate validation, testing and QA then what's wrong with that? From what I've seen, Railo charges for bug fixes or leaves it up to the dev community...I'll let you decide which is preferable!
I hope this helps shed some light on these issues for anyone making this decision.
Nov 4, 2010 at 3:45 PM @Rachel: You said: "Railo charges for bug fixes or leaves it up to the dev community"
I just want to clarify something. Railo Server is an open source and the developer community is allowed to submit patches through JIRA or the team can accept a pull request from github.
The Railo Team *does* fix things without requiring payment. The problem is making time to fix things. They're not a large organization like Adobe. So, if someone needs Secure LDAP bug fixed pronto and they're willing to throw money at it to get it done, then Railo Team can certainly shift gears to do so. From what I've seen, Micha tends to lump tickets together and make a sweeping pass over them (mail, database, etc.). And, of course, patching the server couldn't be any easier IMHO.
If you'd like to see the activity on Railo's public ticket base of how tickets get closed out, please view actually take the time and look for yourself as it's fairly active - https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/RAILO
Nov 4, 2010 at 5:30 PM While Railo might be harder to install than ColdFusion, updates are a lot easier to apply in the Railo admin. This should be an additional point in the Railo PRO section.
Nov 4, 2010 at 6:18 PM I am clearly a supporter of Adobe ColdFusion, as it is a great product, and the community is top notch. I also happen to support Railo, as I am a huge fan of open source and what it generally stands for.
Pros and Cons can certainly be objective, but are often peppered with personal experience, as the author has clearly expressed. I personally use Adobe CF in my professional life, but use Railo for my personal efforts, as running Adobe CF Enterprise on Tomcat on a 1GB RAM VPS is not only difficult from a resource standpoint, but costly. I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of pocket-change to invest in "ROI".
For businesses looking long term I often recommend Adobe CF, as it is Adobe who drives the direction of the CF product and language. Although the other engines innovate in very exciting ways, they can often be "behind" in implementation of "canon" Adobe features.
I feel that choice and competition is key to improvement and innovation, and having more options for the consumer in this case, and knowing what those differences are, is important for the continued growth and direction of CFML.
Cheers!
Nov 4, 2010 at 8:29 PM From someone who has been a in a CF shop for a long time and has wondered about Railo for a while, I'm curious to know something from those of you who have worked in both arenas: Are there any "show stoppers" to consider for switching to Railo? The "ColdFusion or Railo" question is really different for someone who, say, is starting off new versus someone who has a lot of existing CF sites to consider. Thanks.
Nov 4, 2010 at 9:52 PM Most of the suggestions have now been added, the PROS and CONS have been tweaked. Please bear in mind that as I said the Bias is in the eyes of the beholder, it is clear form the comments I have received (not all approved as some were just crude) some Railo users think it is CF biased, some CF users think it is Railo biased. So there is no way to please everyone.
More links added to the Features section.
Nov 4, 2010 at 9:53 PM Russ what JVM did you use for the tests?
Also how about through your test code up to pastbin so we can runt he same code in our environments.
Good write up and more CFML exposure the better regardless of the engine.
Nov 4, 2010 at 10:05 PM Paul,
the tests actually came from someone else's site, and I have now noticed they were done against CF 9 beta, so I will redo them. You should take a look at the link to Jamie Krug's speed test, it is much better.
Nov 4, 2010 at 10:11 PM I didn't know you used Jamies code verbatim. Jamie and I actually worked and spoke about this last year and Jamies post was actually a follow up to mine: http://blog.kukiel.net/2009/07/coldfusion-8-9-and-railo-object.html which was also a follow up to: http://www.objectorientedcoldfusion.org/post.cfm/coldfusion-9-object-creation-performance
We should also note that OpenBD and OpenBD on Google App engine are also viable CFML engines.
Nov 5, 2010 at 11:06 PM @Lee I've ported a few applications from CF to Railo, and still write code daily for both CF and Railo today, and I think I can answer your question.
The short answer is probably not. The only real show stoppers are certain tags that just aren't supported, like flash forms, the pdf tags, etc. If you have a one server platform heavily dependent on the (albeit few) tags railo doesn't support - just stick with CF.
In porting apps, the most frequent problems I have encountered is sloppily written syntax which CF allowed by railo rejects.
For example, when loading a CFC with the dot-notation path of (cfc.people.employee) CFMX 7 will accept (cfc.people..employee) while Railo will barf.
If you're going in the other direction, railo will allow you to define var scoped variables inside of <cffunction> tags anywhere you like. CF will barf and demand they be placed at the top - which is REALLY annoying if you just want to <CFDUMP> one of them out real quick.
So overall, there should be nothing stopping you from giving railo a shot.
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