Tonight I upgraded my server from the Railo 3.0 Community version to Railo 3.1. A couple of weeks ago I upgraded all of my development machines and found that it was an amazingly simple process. Tonight's upgrade was flawless, and my sites were down for literally less than 30 seconds. All I had to do was stop my Railo server, make a backup copy of the "lib" directory, copy/paste the Jar files into the original "lib" directory, and restart Railo. (The Jar files can be found here, under "Railo Custom".)

I still can not get over just how easy this process was! Even after doing this upgrade on multiple dev machines, in the back of my mind I was still halfway expecting to run into some problem when I did it in production. I mean, come on...how many times does an upgrade like this go off without any problems when you do it in production, right?

I tip my hat to the staff behind Railo. They are an amazing group of people who have created an equally amazing product.

This week I decided to upgrade my Railo setup from the older Community version to the latest and greatest Open Source version (3.1.1.000 at the time of this writing). And, I have to admit, I was amazed at how simple it was!

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Gert announced today on the Railo Google Group that the documentation for Railo's cfadmin tag has been published.

The cfadmin tag can be used to interact with the Railo Administrators (both the local web configuration and the global server). More information can be found at http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/documentation/cfadmin-doc

This is so cool! I had no idea that Railo had a tag for interacting with the Railo Administrator. I guess this is Railo's version of the CF Admin API?

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One of the nice things about Railo is its Virtual File Systems, or "Resources" as they're sometimes called. While Railo offers serveral Resources, one of my favorite ones is the built in Resource for Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service). It basically allows you to connect to anything in your Amazon S3 account using any file related CF tag or function, without any extra CF code or CFC calls.

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One of the coolest things about Railo is that it has a built in system for handling bug fixes and patches, and it's all pretty much automated. No searching for and downloading hotfixes, no renaming and copying .jar files, there's just a simple button inside the administrator.

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This may not come as a big surprise to some people, but Railo doesn't seem to recognize the new query result attribute added to CF 8 that gets the ID of an inserted record.

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This was an interesting little "gotcha" I stumbled on tonight. It seems that using a dash in the application name will throw an error in CF, but works fine in Railo.

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I found an interesting inconsistency today between Railo and CF 8, and I have no idea what the real problem is or how to fix it.

I used the Illudium PU-36 Code Generator to create the CF components for a project that I'm working on. The problem I'm having is, whenever I make a call to one of my service components I get a "coldfusion.sql.QueryTable cannot be cast to java.util.Map" error on CF 8, but the same code works fine on Railo.

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Railo Webs are awesome! For those that don't know what a Railo "Web" is, it's basically a way to give each (Railo) CF site on your server its own private settings. Each Railo Web is completely independent from other Railo Webs. So if you've got 10 websites, and every one of them wants a datasourse named "MyDSN" that points to a different database, that's not a problem. If every one of them wants a mapping named "MyMapping" pointing to a different file location, consider it done.

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