Last night, Gert Franz and Michael Streit from Railo Technologies paid a visit to the Boston CFUG on the last stop of their Railo US Road Show. Unless you've been under a rock these last few months, of course you know that Railo 3.1 will be released as open source later in the year (projected for November, according to Gert). Although Gert had to cut his preso short due to time constraints on the use of our venue, it was a great meeting.
I won't go too much into the presentation. Since we were the last stop on the Railo tour, there has already been much written about Gert's talks in other cities (see Mark Esher's and Ben Nadel's excellent writeups, as well as the CFConversations Podcast interview). Suffice to say that Railo is for real, folks. The features that really caught my attention were:
- The ability to separate sites into separate web contexts (with their own datasources, custom tag paths, mappings, etc.), without the need for separate Railo instances
- Virtual file systems -- where you get to treat ftp sites, S3 instances, zip files and other resources as file systems to manipulate with cffile and cfdirectory tags
- Plugins -- this is something that is being worked on by the Railo team. The idea is to be able to install and update free and commercial applications, frameworks, and server add-ons with a couple of mouse clicks from the Railo administrator.
Adobe's own Adam Lehman (presumably in town for business at the Adobe HQ in Newton MA) also dropped in and joined us for beer afterwards. The BCFUG's fearless leader Brian Rinaldi was also there of course, as was co-manager Tom Mollerus, and onTap and DataFaucet frameworks author Isaac ("Ike") Dealy, who recently moved to the Boston area. The conversation centered around Railo (of course), the Broadchoice phenomenon, and superhero movies.
Although I didn't see him at the meeting, I had a great chat with Malcolm O'Keeffe at the bar. Malcolm is the CEO of BlueRiver Interactive, the guys behind Sava, an open source ColdFusion CMS. I have been playing with Sava since it came out and I'm more impressed with it the more I spend time with it. From my talk with Malcolm, it's even more powerful than people realize. The problem, as Malcolm readily admits, is that the documentation is still not where it should be. But they are working on it as well as some great new features. He let me in on a lot of undocumented features of Sava, but I only wish I had a notebook when I was talking to him because my memory is terrible. Anyway, I'm already planning to convert one of my client's sites over to Sava, as that will be a great way to really learn the ins and outs.
Thanks to the guys from Railo for a great meeting and it was great to hang out with everyone last night.
Aug 15, 2008 at 5:10 PM I actually feel rather flattered that not only did you consider my appearance noteworthy, but you took the time to find and link to both of my framework projects *and* my Adobe Community Expert bio. That's a real complement, thanks Tony. :)
Gert's presentation was a lot longer than I expected it to be... I'm accustomed to them lasting ~ an hour... his was what? 3? That's not a complaint, he was covering a lot of material. :)
Haven't seen any email from Brian about speaking... wonder if I should drop him a reminder that I'm interested in getting on the schedule.
Aug 15, 2008 at 7:12 PM It was good to meet you, Ike. The way I look at it, anyone who contributes to the OS CF community deserves recognition (and there were several of you there that night). I'm looking forward to your presos at future meetings. I think a reminder to Brian wouldn't hurt. I know we've got Josh Cyr from Savvy presenting in Sept., but there's nothing scheduled after that according to the web site.