Is OpenBD or Railo a viable replacement for ColdFusion?

Question

Has anyone here had any experience with running OpenBD or Railo in production? We have some legacy CF6.1 apps that need to be hosted somewhere and I'm wondering if OpenBD or Railo is stable enough for production use, won't require a great deal effort to migrate to, etc.

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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

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Railo Professional Open Source

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

Rob, mind if I try to solve your problem by providing a different solution than your question asks?

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: http://www.cf411.com/#cfhost