Railo 3.1, the much anticipated open source release of the Railo CFML engine was released yesterday. I’ve been playing with it the last two evenings. So far I’m very impressed. They have an “Express” version which you can get running almost instantly. I tried that, but then opted to get it working as I would for a real site – using Tomcat and Apache. It was much easier than I thought.

The administrator is very full featured with everything you would expect – scheduled tasks, ability to create database connections to MySQL and MSSQL (among several others), and search! Railo has Apache Lucene built right in. Creating a new Lucene index is as easy as creating Verity collection in Adobe ColdFusion. The cfsearch/cfindex tags work like you would expect them to, with a few exceptions. You can even populate and search the collection right from within the administrator.

I was happy to see that you can define multiple SMTP servers. Railo will try each of them in order if any of them are unavailable.

I also really like the way Railo has done the administrator – with one global administrator (called the server administrator) and then administrators for each site (called a web administrator). I think this is going to make it much easier for hosting companies to offer CFML support.

2 Comments

  1. Adrian Lynch says:

    Do you know if there is anything comparable to vspider in Lucene/Railo?

  2. Ryan Stille says:

    I've never used vspider, so don't know much about it, but I haven't seen any type of http-based crawler in Railo or BD.  I do remember seeing how you could index a directory of documents from within the administrator, but nothing about crawling using http.