This is a recap of how I spent my entire morning. While I'm sure it will be amusing to some, hopefully one day it will be of use to someone in the same situation. Who am I kidding? No one's going to be in this same situation...I'm putting this here to remind me what to do the next time this happens to me!

Our main application at work is running on CF 8 with an Oracle 10g Database backend. Today, just for my own personal curiosity, I decided to see if it would run on Railo. I didn't want anything fancy, no Apache/Tomcat/Jetty/IIS, just a base Railo and Resin install to see if our application would run. I didn't want to use the express version, I wanted an actual install in case I wind up playing with this more in the future.

So, off to www.getrailo.com I went to download the latest and greatest version. It's not there. After clicking around for a while I was redirected over to www.getrailo.org, which apparently is where you have to go to download Railo. So, I downloaded Railo and I'm ready to go. I ran the (super easy) install and everything completed with no problems.

But when I tried to pull up the Railo Administrator, it wouldn't come up. After searching the Railo Google group I found out that it's because I installed Railo using the default install path, which is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Railo\" on Windows Vista 64 bit. This will not work. Something about the directory "Program Files (x86)" causes it to bomb (probably the spaces). So, I uninstalled Railo and re-installed it under "C:\Railo\" and that seemed to fix everything. The administrator now came up as expected.

Since my (fairly large) application was already under "C:\inetpub\wwwroot", I wanted that to be my default directory for my website. So I edited my resin.conf file to change the default host and restarted Railo. I got an error. I kept tinkering with it trying to get it to work, but after several 404, 503, and WTF errors, I gave up on changing my default host and just created a new host entry in resin.conf.

Since I had to give my new host a name, I needed to modify my hosts file in Winders so it would resolve it locally. I opened my hosts file, made the change, and saved it. Oops! Vista won't let me edit the hosts file. I kept getting this error:

So I hit Google up for some answers and found out that I needed to open notepad as administrator, then open the hosts file from within notepad, and then it would allow me to save changes. Vista is so much fun. It's like a little obstacle course any time you want to do something.

Ok, at this point I've got Railo working, my resin.conf file straight, and my hosts file entry was saved. I tried it again and...the Railo administrator for my new site came up! Ta-da! So, now all I needed to do was set up my Oracle datasource and I'm in business! I created a new datasource, gave it a name, entered in all of my connection information, and it failed. I got the following message:

So, I needed the Oracle driver. No big deal, although I did find it a little odd. I guess I just assumed that since Oracle is listed in Railo as an option when creating a new datasource that a driver would already be available. But at least the error was descriptive enough that I knew exactly what needed to be done. I knew the driver was on my system somewhere since I'm already using CF with Oracle. A little Googling lead me to this old post by Steven Erat, which basically helped me figure out all I needed to do was copy the ojdbc14.jar file over to my C:\Railo\lib directory.

But wait! Vista has another plan! Apparently, I can no longer copy and paste any files on my PC. Great! I Googled for a while with no luck and decided to restart and see if that helped. So, I rebooted my PC, and guess what...I still couldn't copy and paste. A little more searching on the Internet and I found out that uninstalling/reinstalling IE 8 fixes the problem. It seems that trying to install IE 7 stand alone causes IE 8 to make windows explorer stop copying and pasting. Holy crap.

I can't uninstall IE 8, it's not even listed as a program I can remove. So, I decided to just try a reinstall over my existing installation and see if that fixed the problem. After a little searching, I found the IE 8 download on MS's website (you would think they would make it a little more obvious). I downloaded it and tried to run it only to have it tell me that I already had a newer version of IE so it wouldn't run. Great. Forget it, I'll work on IE tomorrow, right now I want to get Railo talking to Oracle.

So, since I can't copy and paste or move any files around on my system, I FTP the ojdbc14.jar file up to my web server and then download it to my "C:\Railo\lib" directory. Dirty? Yes, but it worked.

So, here we go again....I restarted Railo, tried to set up my datasource, and it worked! Woo-hoo! I now have Railo up and running on my Winders Vista 64 bit desktop and talking to Oracle, and it only took me 4 hours to do it! :)