Listened to Railo's Gert Franz, as part of the Railo US Tour 08, speak at the Baltimore Adobe User Group last night. And I came away with a very position impression of Railo as CFML engine. Gert spoke for almost three hours and covered a significant amount of territory. The following are what I considered some of the most interesting items from that presentation.

Video

A cfvideo tag was demonstrated that had the capability to play, convert, splice and makes images from video files in several formats including AVI, FLV and MPEG. The most interesting use demonstrated was taking image shots from several points in a video and then displaying those as thumbnails that would then jump to the corresponding spot and start playing. In conjunction was a demonstration of how to move the video processing and serving off the web server and instead use Amazon's cloud computing and storage (S3), basically pay per use utliity computing, for processing and serving respectively. This is particularly interesting because Railo will offer an server image for Amazon's cloud computing.

It should be noted however, this will not be part of the Railo open source distribution. Instead it will be a pay for extension. In part this is due to the backing library being used is a commercial product.

Virtual File Systems & Application Archives

Application server mappings and tag/function attributes/arguments can point to things other than actual operating system file systems. For instance, using a .zip file the source of files for a given mapping was demonstrated. But this can also be other things such as Amazon's S3 or an FTP server.

In addition it's possible to very easily create a sourceless application distribution through Railo's administrator. Granted there's the Adobe cfcompile, but what was demonstrated was literally defining a mapping and clicking create a Railo archive. This archive in turn can then be deployed on another Railo server by setting up a mapping to it. The implications for distributing frameworks and libraries such as Fusebox and say Coldspring are significant because the deployment now becomes only setting up a mapping to a single file rather than expanding an archive onto the filesystem.

Clustering Administration and Data Sharing

The adminstrator allow for configuring servers, things like datasources and mappings, across a cluster in one place. Also Railo has a cluster scope that when changed is propagated across other servers in the cluster, so it behaves as a shared memory space. Again this has been done before and can be accessed from Coldfusion through J2EE session sharing for instance, but this strikes me as a far more elegant solution. That said, the usual caveats about don't abuse shared memory because of all the synchronization and messaging involved applies here.

Conclusion

A disclaimer, I have not used Railo yet. But, based on this presentation I see a feature set not offered with Adobe's engine that I can realistically see uses for in the work I am doing now. If you have the opportunity to see Gert speak on this road show I highly recommend it, because he offers a very in depth discussion of the engine and its feature sets that I think any Coldfusion programmer will find very relevant, and thought provoking, to say the least. At least it was for me.

I work on a Coldfusion Content Management System SiteExecutive. This is very much a product with an established client base in the dozens. We are looking to hire another programmer to work on the product to join a team of programmers including myself.

I think this is an opportunity to solve some interesting problems with datasets that number in the hundreds of thousands of records (and continually growing). It involves understanding and applying concepts and technologies particularly in the parsing and search algorithms space. Generally speaking, the focus is on doing the right thing as opposed to the expedient.

That said, rather than tell you "It's the greatest place to work in the world!" here are some specifics and I'll leave it up to you to make up your mind. Feel free to drop me a line here with questions. The link above includes information about how to apply.

Technologies

• Languages: ColdFusion 8, Java 5
• Web Servers: IIS, Apache
• Databases: Oracle 10, SQL Server 2005 (looking at 2008 this year). There is an opportunity to add MySQL to this stack as well
• OSes: Windows Server 2003 (looking at 2008 this year), Redhat & Solaris (not sure which versions)
• Defect Tracking: Trac
• Source Control: Subversion

Process

• Requirements & Use Cases: from the Alistair Cockburn school of thought (i.e. not UML).
• Coding: no finicky coding standards, emphasis is on avoiding lousy algorithms (e.g. O(n²))
• Testing & Support: developers are not the front line for either

A Rob Brooks-Bilson post touched a nerve of mine regarding Coldfusion's UI tags, like cfform and cfwindow. As well as its integration with third party libraries, such as Verity. In short, they're great if you can live within their limits. But, if you need to go beyond it's a big can't-get-there-from-here.

Take cfform for instance, great idea, but what happens when you start to need things like related select boxes? Little challenging. Or in the more recent case, the issue is the libraries continue to advance, such as Ext and FCKEdit, but the Coldfusion tags lag behind.

My suggestions:

1. divorce the release cycles between UI/third-party integration tags and Coldfusion
2. open source the UI tags with a license that requires changes be made freely available