Recently, I needed to develop a mass emailing application using Coldfusion. I decided to use MySQL this time because it had a web-based management system and I didn’t feel like downloading and installing SQL Server Management Studio. Normally, when developing Coldfusion Apps locally, I would installed the Coldfusion Developer Edition. But, it’s so big and the installation process is kinda long, I decided to Railo. Railo is an open-source CFML processor. It’s compatible with almost all of the original Adobe Coldfusion tags and functions. It’s also very small (8 MB) and the Express version is super simple to install. Just double-click on a batch file and your web server is running. That’s pretty much the installation process. You could even put the whole thing on a USB drive.
To learn more about Railo, visit http://www.getrailo.org/
Here are some features of Railo
- Simpler database access, no closing of records and connections
- In build security against XSS and SSI attacks
- Access Java, C and other libraries with ease
- Integrate into Flash with Blaze DS
- OpenSource like PHP
- Scalable, like Java
- Cacheable