Is OpenBD or Railo a viable replacement for ColdFusion?

I'll chime in as the 'Adobe' guy and say that yes, both OpenBD and Railo are viable CFML engines. The main hurdles are around CFML compatibility. For the last decade Allaire/Macomedia/Adobe has been driving the CFML standard, but we've formed an open CFML Advisory board made up of various experts in the field to help drive the future of the language Today it seems that ColdFusion 7 is the foundational standard.

From there the CFML standard seems to splinter between vendors. ColdFusion 8 added a number of exclusive features that haven't been added to the other engines and vice-versa with Railo and OpenBD. In the future, the CFML Advisory should solve this problem Using ColdFusion as the standard, I find the following two link to be the best places to understand the compatibility differences OpenBD Compatibility Railo Compatability Here is the url for the CFML Advisory group.

They just started the site so there isn't too much info up there yet OpenCFML.org.

I'll chime in as the 'Adobe' guy and say that yes, both OpenBD and Railo are viable CFML engines. The main hurdles are around CFML compatibility. For the last decade Allaire/Macomedia/Adobe has been driving the CFML standard, but we've formed an open CFML Advisory board made up of various experts in the field to help drive the future of the language.

Today it seems that ColdFusion 7 is the foundational standard. From there the CFML standard seems to splinter between vendors. ColdFusion 8 added a number of exclusive features that haven't been added to the other engines and vice-versa with Railo and OpenBD.In the future, the CFML Advisory should solve this problem.

Using ColdFusion as the standard, I find the following two link to be the best places to understand the compatibility differences. OpenBD Compatibility Railo Compatability Here is the url for the CFML Advisory group. They just started the site so there isn't too much info up there yet.

OpenCFML.org.

2 Since this answer is almost two years old, it probably deserves an update. Adobe withdrew from the CFML Advisory Committee in 2010. Both Railo and OpenBD have been adding features steadily over the last few years and now include many of the features added to ColdFusion 8 and ColdFusion 9 - as well as many features not present in the Adobe product.

Railo's documentation can be found here wiki.getrailo. Com and OpenBD's documentation can be found here openbluedragon. Org/manual – Sean Corfield Oct 29 '10 at 1:57 It may be worth noting why Adobe pulled out of the committee.

If you're interested in that detail, here is the announcement. – Adam Tuttle Dec 4 '10 at 13:11.

Both are on par with CFMX 7 compatability so you shouldn't have any problems migrating a cf6.1 site to either. Be for warned through that OpenBD DOES NOT support the CFDOCUMENT tag so PDF generation is going to be a problem. Railo on the other hand does.

Railo has an express version, which doesn't require an install and makes it real easy to see if an existing application works with it or not. OpenBD also has a download and ready to run version, though I haven't tried it out, it should be as easy to setup as the Railo Express version. It seems that there is project started for OpenBD to integrate the Flying Saucer project as a replacement for CFDOCUMENT support.

More can be found here about this.

The CFML compatibility in Railo is a major focus for us. If there are things in Railo that aren't compatible with Adobe CF, then please let us know about them and then we'll try to fix them asap. We are of course trying to get all the requirements of the CFML Advisory Committee implemented in Railo 3.1.X so that we can call ourselves CFML 2009 compatible.

AFAIK an engine should implement the core and the extended core to be called CFML 2009 compatible, but I guess the Advisory Committee hasn't agreed on this. In fact the vendors (like we are) should obey these standards and implement them accordingly. If of course you experience any problems, just let the Railo Google group know or contact us at www.getrailo.com Gert Franz Railo Professional Open Source.

Absolutely! Both are enterprise class solutions and shouldn't pose too many problems. As rip747 mentions there are copies you can download to quickly test your applications compatibility.As for performance it's generally believed that Railo is the fastest of the three engines while BlueDragon is the slowest.

Although it's not currently in production I'm developing an application against Railo 3.0 and intend to deploy to Railo 3.1 once it's released.

Support for cfdocument will be included in the next "major" versioned release of OpenBD. Just to give folks a bit of background on cfdocument support in OpenBD, a commercial library was used for cfdocument in New Atlanta BlueDragon, so that had to be removed when OpenBD went open source. The "hooks" are still in the OpenBD engine, however, so it's really just a matter of implementing the underlying functionality using an open source document engine, of which there are many.

I think replacedirect. Nl recently migrated their webshop to railo.

Railo virtually has no documentation. It does not seem to be a priority for the core team, they have not managed the Railo open source project well. It is a case of lost momentum due to incompetency.

Railo is quite difficult to deploy on account of very weak documentation and consequently cannot be taken seriously. Furthermore the tag and function tags are empty when you scroll down to usage examples. This open source project and the team running it are a joke, completely out of touch with the recurrinfg complaints of install/config difficulties over the past 2 years.

Stick with Adobe Coldfusion which has good documentation or switch to another language.

1 This comment appeared in several places on the Internet in early October and is likely posted by the same person who has been sending insulting emails to many of the Railo team (since it uses very similar wording). – Sean Corfield Oct 29 '10 at 2:03 The author has a point but it's lost in the insulting tone. Railo IS lacking in documentation (as of July 2011).

Its official wiki really just lays out the function/tag parameters and provides very little in the way of concise explanations, known bugs/limitations, examples, etc. On the other hand 99.5% of CF9 documentation and literature is directly applicable to Railo and BD so the issue is not so much a lack a documentation but a lack of "official" documentation and even then there is a considerable amount of content on the wiki, blog and mailing lists discussing known compatibility issues – SpliFF Jul 28 at 6:33.

In that you mention an interest in hosting, just keep in mind that if you mean shared hosting, then you don't need to worry about the cost of the CFML engine. That will be born by the hosting provider, and amortized over the folks on the server.As such, you will find many low- (and even no-) cost CF hosting providers running on Adobe CF (and you'll find a range of them running different versions to suit one's taste, from CF 6, 7, 8, or 9, as I write today. ) There are various lists of CF hosting providers.

I offer one (and also provide pointers to still other lists) at a category of my CF411 site: cf411.com/#cfhost.

I'll chime in as the 'Adobe' guy and say that yes, both OpenBD and Railo are viable CFML engines. The main hurdles are around CFML compatibility. For the last decade Allaire/Macomedia/Adobe has been driving the CFML standard, but we've formed an open CFML Advisory board made up of various experts in the field to help drive the future of the language.

Both are on par with CFMX 7 compatability so you shouldn't have any problems migrating a cf6.1 site to either.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.