What things should I consider before moving from CF9 to Railo?

Question

I've been using ColdFusion 9 along with the ColdFusion on Wheels Framework for about 6 months now. I still consider myself a beginner, but I am comfortable doing most things I need to.

I recently started writing full CF Script components, and I'm loving the cleanliness of the syntax. I am disappointed to lose some of the simplicity afforded by CFQuery, CFLoop, and so on... but I can live without this for now.

Recently, a few people have mentioned that Railo has better CFScript support. I'm considering switching for that reason.

What things should I keep in mind, and how do the two platforms stack against one another in terms of functionality and ease of use?

Answer 1

Here are the things you need to look for as far as differences between Railo and ColdFusion. This page lists all of the things that Adobe CF has that Railo doesn't, and vice versa:

http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/documentation/compatibility/cfml-compatibility/

Answer 2

Mel,

well the easiest way to try it out is to create a mapping called "/" that points to "/" and then compile this mapping from the admin. That should give you a good result on how compatible your code is in terms of compilation.

And a good thing to consider. If you are really happy with CF9, stick with it. You never change a winning team. I am of course proud of Railo and convinced it is the best CFML engine. But I am biased and you should only consider a switch if it is really necessary for different reasons. Costs, performance, memory footprint. But again, if your system runs very well on CF9, just save the money and do something else with it.

Gert Franz Railo Technologies GmbH