What do you want Railo Server to be?

[Mark Drew]

Hi All! 

As you all might have heard, Railo Technologies, the company behind Railo Server is becoming larger. As part of this move, and our focusing more efforts in developing a better platform for your applications, we are forming a Technical Development Advisory Committee. The members and roles to this committee are yet to be defined but it's main focus is to look at the features and roadmap for Railo Server. 

This is not just a bunch of people sitting in a smoke filled room, rubbing their hands and scheming, it's users and companies and , through community liaisons, YOU! 

So, what would you like to see in future releases of Railo (we are thinking 4.5, 5.x, 6.x)? 

We appreciate your ideas of course! Do try not to say things like "a fix for bug XYZ" but more keep it to features. 

For example, one of the features I am thinking (and working on adding as an extension) personally is having a noSQL document and graph database already built into Railo! 

Now's YOUR turn!

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Michael van Leest]

My 0.02...

- Better documentation. As the docs are right now, it's a bit embarrassing compared to other languages/servers. As the "Railo group" is maturing, so should the documentation.

- Centralized knowledge base like the Adobe Devnet, purely for Railo. By centralizing helpful samples and articles, it can help boost the adoption of Railo.

- More event gateways out of the box (messaging, socket, wowza media server, Amazon SQS to name a few)

2012/9/12 Mark Drew <ma...@getrailo.com>

--
Michael van Leest

[Jean Moniatte]

I agree about the documentation. I know it ships in the admin, but it is too time consuming to lookup anything. I always end up using the CFDOCs that ships with ACF. There is room for improvement, either with a local doc that ships with Railo or with a doc that is hosted somewhere (like ACF has cfdocs.org).

Thanks,

Jean

--

Jean Moniatte

UGAL

je...@ugal.com

www.ugal.com

[Mark Drew]

Ok, we have a project currently going to look at the documentation. Anything else?

Regards

Mark Drew

[Jean Moniatte]

"Enabling Enterprise to easily integrate with Social Media Streams", like on the ACF roadmap.

LOL

Thanks,

Jean

--

Jean Moniatte

UGAL

je...@ugal.com

www.ugal.com

[Mark Drew]

I think you mean Facebook and twitter integration? Maybe easier oAuth?

Regards

Mark Drew

[Jean Moniatte]

No, I was (trying to) joke :-)

Please keep developing the server side functionalities of Railo, not the front end stuff. We do not need buzz words.

Thanks,

Jean

--

Jean Moniatte

UGAL

je...@ugal.com

www.ugal.com

[Hendrik Kramer]

What I really would like to see in the future is a better integration of the Apache POI library. It could also be as a plugin, and cfspreadsheet is a start, but creating, reading and handling PDF/Word/Excel and OpenOffice files the easy way would be highly appreciated. 

Some other things I would like to see:

- Integration of a mailserver, so we could better track delayed email delivery bounces

- New Coldfusion Template files that are allowed to handle only a specific subset of tags ( cfoutput/cfloop/cfif and custom tags maybe )

- Native support for NoSQL databases (we use cfmongodb here, but a native approach would be great)

- cfargument type "integer" beside "Numeric/Number" (to circumvent special tests)

- Easier creation and managing of archives for deployment

- Git integration ( to pull and install new releases from the PROD branch ) would be cool

- Better charting

- htmlunformat (parses html to normal text including html entities)

- new functions to return false on functions like len() and isNumeric() etc. even when the value is not available (NULL) instead of throwing an error. Makes it easier for xml parsing.

[Mark Drew]

I understood your joke :) 

I was just making going on the joke and seeing if there was something there for it! 

For example: http://oauth.net/code/

Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Judith Barnett]

When redoing the documentation, please do not assume that everyone
reading it will know the meaning of all technical terms, or how to a
particular function, so a bit of explanation, a link, or even a tool
tip, that can be understood by those less savvy about the inner
workings of Railo and the various connectors, etc..would be very nice.
I've been programming for 40 years, and would like to think I am
fairly competent, but I rarely read a page of Railo documentation that
doesn't require me to Google at least one term.

[Mark Drew]

See my comments inline:

On 13 Sep 2012, at 10:29, Hendrik Kramer <hendrik...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What I really would like to see in the future is a better integration of the Apache POI library. It could also be as a plugin, and cfspreadsheet is a start, but creating, reading and handling PDF/Word/Excel and OpenOffice files the easy way would be highly appreciated.

Makes sense, and to me, it sounds like a great project for people to get involved in extending the cfspreadsheet extension! Check it out and extend it!
https://github.com/andyj/RailoExtensionProvider

>
> Some other things I would like to see:
> - Integration of a mailserver, so we could better track delayed email delivery bounces

Makes total sense, so it's all integrated. Security would be an issue, so you don't become a relay but something like James could be added:
http://james.apache.org/server/

> - New Coldfusion Template files that are allowed to handle only a specific subset of tags ( cfoutput/cfloop/cfif and custom tags maybe )

For views you mean? somethign like an .rt (railo template) compared to a .rct (Railo Class Template or something) ?

> - Native support for NoSQL databases (we use cfmongodb here, but a native approach would be great)

I have been looking at OrientDB http://www.orientdb.org/index.htm which does both graphs and documents.

> - cfargument type "integer" beside "Numeric/Number" (to circumvent special tests)

Then would you have double and float too?

> - Easier creation and managing of archives for deployment

Like creating WAR files for example?

> - Git integration ( to pull and install new releases from the PROD branch ) would be cool

Integration into Railo as a language feature or a way for getting the nightlies (not part of the product but more part of the process?)

> - Better charting
Something like Flot for example? Or https://code.google.com/p/charts4j/

> - htmlunformat (parses html to normal text including html entities)

Maybe also Markdown processors or something? We already have XMLParse and HTMLParse by the way :) So you could do an XSLT on it and release it as an extension?

> - new functions to return false on functions like len() and isNumeric() etc. even when the value is not available (NULL) instead of throwing an error. Makes it easier for xml parsing.

Not sure on this one, but sure, this sounds like a bug? rather than a feature :)

[Mark Drew]

Documentation is certainly a tough issue. I.e. it has to be many things to many different people. 

We have been trying but remember, writing some features are easy, it's the writing of all the documentation that is hard. 

I would like to gather ideas for features so I can take them to the committee, and I get the point that people want more/better/easier/nicer/prettier documentation. And we are working on it. 

Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Geoff Parkhurst]

On 13 September 2012 10:42, Mark Drew <ma...@getrailo.com> wrote:

>> - New Coldfusion Template files that are allowed to handle only a specific subset of tags ( cfoutput/cfloop/cfif and custom tags maybe )
> For views you mean? somethign like an .rt (railo template) compared to a .rct (Railo Class Template or something) ?

Or maybe support for a separate templating language? (I'd vote for
twig / jinja style templates as I'm in love with Django)

[Jean Moniatte]

Hello,

One idea might be to ship the documentation as a Tiddly Wiki (http://tiddlywiki.com). We can easily make it look pretty with Railo branding and importing the documentation that is already available from the admin into it would probably not be too difficult either.

If others think that it could be a good format, I can spend some time trying to get a proof of concept up and running. The nice thing about it is that we would end with a local AND dynamic documentation.

Thanks,

Jean

--

Jean Moniatte

UGAL

je...@ugal.com

www.ugal.com

[Hendrik Kramer]

See my comments also inline:

Am Donnerstag, 13. September 2012 11:42:40 UTC+2 schrieb Mark Drew:

See my comments inline:

On 13 Sep 2012, at 10:29, Hendrik Kramer <hendrik...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What I really would like to see in the future is a better integration of the Apache POI library. It could also be as a plugin, and cfspreadsheet is a start, but creating, reading and handling PDF/Word/Excel and OpenOffice files the easy way would be highly appreciated.
Makes sense, and to me, it sounds like a great project for people to get involved in extending the cfspreadsheet extension! Check it out and extend it!
https://github.com/andyj/RailoExtensionProvider

Yes, but it seems I need to rewrite it in many parts. I tested with an export document that includes only one style applied to the header row, and Apache POI throws an error of "too many styles applied". Solving this means rewriting it. But of course extending this is the best way of doing it. What I meant in relation here is that (correct me if I'm wrong) the POI library in Railo is rather old and conflicts with modern versions that could solve some problems. So considering these library from the Railo perspective as important as the built-in PDF would be nice. Creating native Excel/Word documents in an easy "CFML" way is a great addition to the platform IMO.

 

>
> Some other things I would like to see:
> - Integration of a mailserver, so we could better track delayed email delivery bounces
Makes total sense, so it's all integrated. Security would be an issue, so you don't become a relay but something like James could be added:
http://james.apache.org/server/

Yep, that would be fine. Working with external mailservers is possible, but having full control on server side is a nice addition.

 

> - New Coldfusion Template files that are allowed to handle only a specific subset of tags ( cfoutput/cfloop/cfif and custom tags maybe )
For views you mean? somethign like an .rt (railo template) compared to a .rct (Railo Class Template or something) ?

A new file type addition like .cft compared to .cfm or .cfc that could be used for views that mix html output with basic CFML flow control tags. Restricting tags in CF Admin for this template would be fine, e.g. no CFQUERY allowed in a view / .cft file.

 

> - Native support for NoSQL databases (we use cfmongodb here, but a native approach would be great)
I have been looking at OrientDB http://www.orientdb.org/index.htm which does both graphs and documents.

Something like this. Would be great to define the MongoDB, SimpleDB, CouchDB database in the CF Admin like SQL databases and having plain get()/write()/update()/find() statements built in.

> - cfargument type "integer" beside "Numeric/Number" (to circumvent special tests)
Then would you have double and float too?

I'm not tested it now, but I remember that CFML Numeric is "double", or not? We provide some SOAP webservices and "numberOfAdultsPerRoom" is returned as Double/Float in the WSDL which is a bit strange of course. At all, most tags like cfparam, cfargument and isNumeric could be tested for an integer or float value in a second step, but having isInt(), cfargument type="int" just makes it a bit nicer.

> - Easier creation and managing of archives for deployment
Like creating WAR files for example?

No, I mean the .ra archives. I have a mapping to a complete folder that holds our core framework components and would like to release it as .ra archives to other servers, but there are always missing files in the archives, so a deployment doesn't work without extra steps. But maybe it's my fault/misunderstanding of the concept, but I just want to have /com/hotelwebservice/* released as a compiled classes only archive (source code protection) to our customers.

 

> - Git integration ( to pull and install new releases from the PROD branch ) would be cool
Integration into Railo as a language feature or a way for getting the nightlies (not part of the product but more part of the process?)

Yes, both as a language feature and built into the Web Admin. Similar to the update process for new Railo releases (lovin' it), it would be fine to link the current web or subfolders against a Git repository and production branch and then list new updates and update/rollback to/from the newest version directly pulled from Git.

 

> - Better charting
Something like Flot  for example? Or https://code.google.com/p/charts4j/

Yes. Similar to the cfchart we have now, I would like a server side library that is able to output the charts to html/email/pdf/Word/Excel (via Apache POI) for business reports. So a pure javascript/HTML 5 solution is nice, but not printable/usable in report files.

 

> - htmlunformat (parses html to normal text including html entities)
Maybe also Markdown processors or something? We already have XMLParse and HTMLParse by the way :) So you could do an XSLT on it and release it as an extension?

Yes, that would be possible. I'll check.

> - new functions to return false on functions like len() and isNumeric() etc. even when the value is not available (NULL) instead of throwing an error. Makes it easier for xml parsing.
Not sure on this one, but sure, this sounds like a bug? rather than a feature :)

No, it's not a bug. Consider to parse/import an xml file where you don't know if an attribute/node is there or not. Then you need to write every time:

if( structKeyExists( myXML.node.xmlAttributes, 'subSubNode') && len( myXML.node.xmlAttributes.subSubNode.xmlText ) )

 ...

Some other languages allow the following to be valid:

  if( len( myXML.node.xmlAttributes.subSubNode.xmlText ) )

So the code return false if the attribute has no length or doesn't exists and you have to write less code. Same for isNumeric etc. Maybe this could be achieved by a second boolean parameter to len(), isNumeric(), isValid()?

...

Of course there is no must-have feature here and I'm already happy with the current state. It should be considered as an collection of ideas for future versions of Railo.

[Hendrik Kramer]

Sorry, the xml examples are invalid: 

Current logic:

  if( structKeyExists( myXML.node.xmlAttributes, 'marketingCode') && isNumeric( myXML.node.xmlAttributes.marketingCode) )

versus (parameter true for throwErrorIfNull=false)

  if( isNumeric( myXML.node.xmlAttributes.marketingCode, false ) )

This is helpful when you have a lot of xml to parse with optional parameters.

[Mark Drew]

Tiddly Wiki looks interesting. 

Basically (and I didn't want this thread to be all about documentation, I get it, we get it, we are doing something about it!) we are developing a documentation system with a partner company. The important part, for us, is that it does exports (and imports) to and from various formats and also it is very versionable (is that a word?)

So exports would be things like CFEclipse dictionaries, TextMate/Sublime dictionaries, Wiki entries, and even the internal documentation that is assigned to tags and functions, as well as training courses and what have you. 

Going back to distributed docs (which would be something else we would output to) , it has certain requirements, which are the same as the admin. You will notice currently the railo adminstrator is in a mapping called /railo-context/admin

That is actually a mapping and the only files that can be served from a mapping are .cfm (and .cfc) files. So no images etc. 

How we get round that in the admin is to use base64 encoded images (check out the view source in the Railo admin) as well as CSS files as .cfm files. 

So, if you want to get the documentation going... GREAT! 

Also remember that there are some other challenges, and that is due to our quick turn around, is that we have new versions every few weeks, that might add stuff to the documentation, so we have to keep version control etc, so if we want to get all the docs for 3.3.4.003 we can as easily as we can for version 3.3.5.004

So, I know this is a long email, but I have been thinking and trying to keep the documentation up to date for a long time, and there ARE issues that are bigger than you think. Hence us working on developing a custom documentation solution with a partner at the moment. 

Phew. There you go, 

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Peter Boughton]

Hendrik wrote:
> A new file type addition like .cft compared to .cfm or .cfc that could
> be used for views that mix html output with basic CFML flow control
> tags. Restricting tags in CF Admin for this template would be fine,
> e.g. no CFQUERY allowed in a view / .cft file.

Why?

It seems a pointless thing to do in the first place (human code
reviews are better), but ignoring that aspect, it can already be done
right now.

You can already have any file extension you like - cfinclude doesn't
care, and you can configure the servlet to accept *.cft too.

To restrict the tags you can add an on-commit hook to your source
control to check *.cft files for <cf(?!if|output|etc)\w+ and abort the
commit if found.

> We provide some SOAP webservices and "numberOfAdultsPerRoom" is
> returned as Double/Float in the WSDL which is a bit strange of course.

So do you care more about returning sensible types to WSDL?

Perhaps a wsdl:type or remote:type attribute that overrides the normal
type when used as a webservice would be useful?

[Peter Boughton]

I haven't looked into how it works yet, but xiki looks cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUR_eUVcABg

If everything there where they say "Ruby" could be replaced with Railo/CFML that would be excellent. :)

[Mark Drew]

Wow! That looks kick arse! 

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[colbylitnak]

I second the native noSQL support, that would be wicked cool. Honestly 

Not really a Railo server "feature", but I think the reported bugs stagnate for too long. Maybe allowing the community to fix them (I have a standing pull request on my fork for things I have fixed, I haven't noticed any fixes get pulled into the railo branch).

[Mark Drew]

The thing with "native noSQL support" is that the landscape is changing a lot. 

So, currently we provide drivers and what have you to use noSQL db's as cache stores. But going forward that could change PER implementation as a Cassandra implementation would be very different from a MongoDB implementation. 

With regards to pull requests, it's better if they have a ticket and test case assigned. I am looking back into the pull request process and they might be rejected if there is no equivalent test (not saying yours don't, I am just saying in general) 

Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Mark Drew]

Just to get some ideas flowing I thought I would put some more ideas forward (rather than talking about bugs):

1. Add other ORM systems (that get over the issues with Hibernate) see: http://empire-db.apache.org and http://cayenne.apache.org
2. Add better encoders and decoders such as Base64, Hex, Phonetic and URLs see : http://commons.apache.org/codec/
3. Add a content repository API (anyone remember the COAPI?) see: http://jackrabbit.apache.org
4. Implement the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (maybe as a Event Handler) see: http://qpid.apache.org
5. Implement ActiveMQ as an Event Handler see: http://activemq.apache.org
6. Have a common cloud service api (<cfcloud> anyone? ) : http://whirr.apache.org
7. Implement a Jabber Server: http://mina.apache.org/vysper/
8. Since we are serving things, also let's do an FTP server!  http://mina.apache.org/ftpserver/

How's that for some ideas?

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

On 13 Sep 2012, at 15:35, colbylitnak <colby_...@hotmail.com> wrote:

[Hendrik Kramer]

@Peter:_

Why?

Good questions, I'm not sure if we should discuss it here, this are just collected ideas and of course not everything will be agreed upon. The difference is that if we include a template, it should be interpreted and compiled, so I can't search for tags here. Doing it with manual reviews is something which fills up my day and is ok (I get paid for it), but I think the original idea was from a thread Mark opened quite a time ago where he had the idea about the future of CFML (cfc components should be written always in script, and some very limited language for the views). This will enforce a logic alread from the application server, which is of course arguable if this is good or not. But hey - we're talking about the possible future.

The basic idea is to setup some DSL specific language for the views, comparable to Typo3Script etc.

 

> We provide some SOAP webservices and "numberOfAdultsPerRoom" is
> returned as Double/Float in the WSDL which is a bit strange of course.

So do you care more about returning sensible types to WSDL?

Perhaps a wsdl:type or remote:type attribute that overrides the normal
type when used as a webservice would be useful?

It's not only WSDL - this was only the first thing I remembered where people asking me about this. We also allow remote access to cfcs (AMF/direct invocation) and it would be nice to just force integer where we need them in comparison to floating numeric values that need to be validated afterwards. The idea here is  to safe code lines to make the code more readable and understandable. 

 

[Michael Zock]

Some examples from my projects during the last year or so that would've been great to have out-of-the-box (instead of rolling my own solutions or to-do lists):

- More versatile PDF generation (e.g., the much more powerful wkhtmltopdf utility that even supports JS-based content adjustment within a custom delay).
- Audit /change log support for Hibernate entities (especially considering how both ACF and Railo probably have Envers as part of their Hibernate libraries under the hood anyway). ORM itself just has "preUpdate(oldData)" and leaves you with a ton of footwork to do.
- Adapters for a few of the most prominent noSQL solutions so they could be connected to as easily as today's access to classic databases with their JDBC drivers. Maybe even as a commented adapter for others to repeat for other engines.
- Ability to define our own comparison methods for components to leverage them our data similar to Comparable, Sortable and java.util.Collections.sort() in Java. Though some Railo 4 features will already take care of a lot of that.
- unFormat functions to reverse heavy encodings (like what the default ESAPI formatting method spit out).
- Haven't checked in a while, but does Railo connect the " ... required=false ..." information to its counterpart in the generated WSDL (ACF doesn't seem to be able to)?

oAuth isn't a bad idea, but like some other ideas that's something that would be better off as an extension

As for the documentation topic, that's certainly valid, considering all the new features Railo has gained that the other engines don't have or at least don't yet have.

There's a lot of stuff that would be nice to have, but the improved Java integration in Railo 4 should already allow us to solve a lot of things by using the best of both worlds.

[Gunnar]

• Native support for performant string concatenation (Java String buffer)
• Indexed columns in Query of Queries so that you can work fast with large sets
• Metadata reading and writing (XMP, IPTC) in images (there are command line tools like http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ but native support would be great)

[Gunnar]

If you have long running requests which run for hours or days I find it very hard to find objects which are not cleared by the next garbage collection. So some debug information which object will stay alive till the end of the request would be very helpful.

[Peter Pham]

My wish list:
- more enhancement for QoQ such as LEFT OUTER JOIN, FULL OUTER JOIN, etc.
- improve chart graphic and varieties
- a makeover of Railo admin area

[Jordan Michaels]

Can you give specifics for these? Like what exactly would you like to see?

Warm Regards,
Jordan Michaels

[colbylitnak]

Thanks Mark. Maybe what I am missing is a "howto contribute" document. maybe everyone else contributing knows how to do it and I am the one that doesn't :(

[Alan Holden]

On the documentation front... and this transcends Railo a bit:

I wish there was a "CFML Rosetta Stone". It would be something like CFDocs, but with a matrix architecture so you could quickly x-reference a tag or function across ACF, Railo and OpenBD (& even desktop, cloud, Jakarta, Tomcat versions, etc). This would help us develop apps that worked across the spectrum, help us solve those "it worked here, why not here?" bugs, and thereby help to advance CFML in general - to the benefit of all.

Unfortunately, this will probably remain a wish for some time... for it would probably need to be housed and managed separately, and would take a little chunk of time (and money) to develop and maintain.

Sigh,

Al

On Wednesday, September 12, 2012 8:10:10 PM UTC-7, mvanleest wrote:

My 0.02...

- Better documentation. As the docs are right now, it's a bit embarrassing compared to other languages/servers. As the "Railo group" is maturing, so should the documentation.

- Centralized knowledge base like the Adobe Devnet, purely for Railo. By centralizing helpful samples and articles, it can help boost the adoption of Railo.

- More event gateways out of the box (messaging, socket, wowza media server, Amazon SQS to name a few)

2012/9/12 Mark Drew <ma...@getrailo.com>

Hi All! 

As you all might have heard, Railo Technologies, the company behind Railo Server is becoming larger. As part of this move, and our focusing more efforts in developing a better platform for your applications, we are forming a Technical Development Advisory Committee. The members and roles to this committee are yet to be defined but it's main focus is to look at the features and roadmap for Railo Server. 

This is not just a bunch of people sitting in a smoke filled room, rubbing their hands and scheming, it's users and companies and , through community liaisons, YOU! 

So, what would you like to see in future releases of Railo (we are thinking 4.5, 5.x, 6.x)? 

We appreciate your ideas of course! Do try not to say things like "a fix for bug XYZ" but more keep it to features. 

For example, one of the features I am thinking (and working on adding as an extension) personally is having a noSQL document and graph database already built into Railo! 

Now's YOUR turn!

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

--
Michael van Leest

[Mark Drew]

Why don't you get it started?

Regards

Mark Drew

[Mark Drew]

Not at all, we had a document somewhere which I shall add to the GitHub wiki. Would that help?

Regards

Mark Drew

[Mark Drew]

Hi there, I have updated the Contributor's Agreement page on the wiki on the repository itself. 

I am going to add documentation links in the README.md file of the railo source later today (today is my website updates day! yay!) so that it's always there. I also need to change what it is saying currently and if I can see about updating the build (although I might not be able to finish it all today) 

https://github.com/getrailo/railo/wiki/Contributing%3AContributor%27s-Agreement

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

On 14 Sep 2012, at 03:13, colbylitnak <colby_...@hotmail.com> wrote:

[Adam Cameron]

G'day
I was going to reply here but it all got a bit rambling (and cross-platform), so I've made a blog post instead, which is over here: http://adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/improving-cfmls-documentation.html

The bottom line is I'd be dead keen to get a common CFML documentation project going, and did a small amount of research into it a while back.

It could be pretty quick to get a reasonable docs repository up and running - with baseline content - fairly quickly...

Lemme know if this bares out further discussion (perhaps not on this thread, as it would be a bit of a hijack).

--
Adam

[Mark Drew]

What is interesting is that the CF10 Docs are Creative Commons... that is new?

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Adam Cameron]

No idea mate.  It surprised me too: I always just assumed - Adobe being a big meany corporation 'n' all - they'd be pretty closed-shop about all that stuff.

I know there was/is CFQuickDocs or something like that out there which seems to have their own copy of the CF docs, and that's been around for years and years.  I always wondered how they were allowed to do that (or even if they were allowed to do it)... but it perhaps suggests that it's been that way for a while!

--
Adam

[Mark Drew]

I think they kept the proper licenses and what have you, which you kinda have to do regardless. But I guess you can do a remix now.

All of our Tag/Function documentation can be obtained via:

getTagList() and GetTagData("cf", "abort");

and 

getFunctionList() with getFunctionData("ListGetAt") 

And as I mentioned before, we are working on a versioned documentation system with a partner. 

Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Gert Franz]

One addition one of our clients would like to have is with Scheduled Tasks.

Here one can define an output file. It would be nice to add an append function with a rollover after a certain size or time.

 

Greetings from Switzerland

Gert Franz

 

Railo Technologies      Professional Open Source

skype: gert.franz         ge...@getrailo.com

+41 76 5680 231           www.getrailo.com

[Risto]

How about an easy way to work with Jasper Reports?

I know and kay and I still have no idea how the extension works:)

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/railo/risto/railo/CkM1NtzpkPo/ULCoW8uCJykJ

[Brad Wood]

I know there was/is CFQuickDocs or something like that out there which seems to have their own copy of the CF docs, and that's been around for years and years.  I always wondered how they were allowed to do that (or even if they were allowed to do it)... but it perhaps suggests that it's been that way for a while!

 

In the past, Adobe regarded CFQuickDocs as a "Community Resource" and seemed to welcome it.   See this comment from Ben Forta a few years back:

http://corfield.org/blog/post.cfm/New_Atlanta_calls_you_legacy#comment-6A562EF8-E231-788E-A75D85D38F4C43BB 

[Brad Wood]

- htmlunformat (parses html to normal text including html entities)

Would native access to a library like Anti-Sammy be what you're talking about, or are you thinking something different?

 ~Brad

[Gerald Guido]

1++ for POI. I have been working with it a lot these days and it is a bit cumbersome compared to CF implementation(s) of cfspreadsheet.

Also extended PDF support.. DDX/processddx support would be AWESOME. Re: PDF is the document standard in business today. Almost everything that is, or was paper is converted to PDF these days. Especially for archival and long term storage.

Also support for the emerging HTML5 technologies like WebsSockets. As more and more of my logic moves client side AJAXish communication with the back end is becoming more and more important. Real time bi-directional communication with client side JS is a godsend.

There are a good number of Java implementations out there that could be used a starting point. 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4262543/what-are-good-resources-for-learning-html-5-websockets

I know that Andrea Campolonghi has been working on his Websocket Gateway Extension and for which I am grateful but it does not look like he has updated it in quite some time. 

https://github.com/andreacfm/WebSocket-Gateway-Extension

And as always, many thanx for your contributions to CF and the community. It truly is a wonderful thing for which I am grateful.

G!

--
Gerald Guido
http://www.myinternetisbroken.com
 

[Dawesi]

 - mailsource - one or more servers (round robin) configured to be a mail source - kind of like datasource
   - have a setting that allows emails to be spread over servers in group (say 1000 emails, 5 servers = 200 each per queue)
   - basic mailserver loadbalancing so email is sent to server with shortest queue
   - also like the integration with mailservers (sendmail, mailenable, smartermail, amazon, mailchimp, and other online services
   - , etc - including outlook features mail, notes, tasks, etc)
 - vCal/iCal tag for generating calendar files
 - 2d, 3d barcodes
 - generic ajax tie in so you can use your favourite ajax desktop/mobile framework (sencha/jquery/etc) - ie: remove direct tie ins to any 'specific' framework
 - cloud integration with mappings (to skydrive, box.net, dropbox.com, google drive, etc) + interface for custom
 - network tools - ping, http/s get/post, ftp, sntp, etc
 - oAuth library included
 - java dotnet bridge
 - cfupsert - joining cfinsert and cfupdate
 - ability to trigger an event from a value change (ie if I have a rating that has 9 in it and I change that to 10, an event is triggered) eg rating.on('change', function(newVal,oldValue,event) ) { ..code.. }
 - simple inbuilt iis/apache/tomcat config for sites (already a extension that does most of this)
 - Features of others : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/63998/hidden-features-of-ruby  (also listed hidden features of c#, java, ruby on rails, python )

Hmm... more where those came from...

[Dawesi]

from an older post:

valueList() function:

• add startrow and maxrows OR startrow and endrow params so you can filter it without having to loop
• add another attribute to cfloop and cfoutput (name=bla?) so that you could reference a particular tag for getting your valuelist
• add nullValue AND emptyValue parameters to allow a value to be set if the value is null
  • to set each row’s parameter to a default (like isNull(x,0) in sql) eg: (10,,,3,4 becomes 10,0,0,3,4 with nullValue set to 0)
• Add another parameter to set value if nothing is in the output (aka = “”) so when you’re using it in a query like bob IN (<cfqueryparam value=#valuelist(qPages.status)#”>) you can utilize it like someid IN <cfqueryparam value=#valuelist(qPages.status,0)#”>
• formatting parameter (ie: format=”date” mask=”dd/mm/yy” or format=”number” mask=”(00) 0000 0000″)

Ajax Libraries:

• Ability to set the ajax libraries in application settings  in app.cfc so you can choose ONE engine for scripts to be generated/used.
• Abiltity to have a ajaxsource like a datasource and you can add them into the administrator ( and point them to cdn’s/google
  • CFAJAX lib=”ext,jquery,spry,etc” validate=”ext” source=”googlecode”
  • CFAJAXLIB lib=”ext” -> this points to ajaxmapping

ColdFusion Administrator:

1. Admin API needs to be more thorough
   
2. ExtJS based admin panel
3. Inline updater for updates (as well as visual alerts when one is available)
4. Multiple site admin with better usability – make more like other similar managers like vmware or alike
5. Mailserver to be added as mailsources like databases so you can add mailsource=”gmail.com” to your cfmail tag

• also need a flag that can be set to ‘developer’ so that it just queues those emails in a folder called ‘dev’ on same level as spool and undelivr and expose the directory through the admin api so that it can be read programically (as well as a basic ajax reader in the cfadmin that can read html and text versions of the messagesApplication-Based Settings

Application-Specific Settings:

1. Ability to specifiy default component to be extended per application
2. beforeApplicationStart event that can be managed through an interface of scripts

Generally:

1. Use GlassFish instead of Tomcat
   
2. Fix the ExtJS stuff and remove the jQuery and other javascript stuff
3. CFANT tag/cfscript also incorporating subversion repository management
4. Global proxy settings for getting out of firewalls easily
5. get application.cfc to work like other cfcs including interaction
6. onServerStart server-warming feature that applications can add via cfadmin api – and managed through list interface
7. Support cloud support for mappings, etc
8. Support install to the cloud
9. Minimise install by having a core install and option selected functionalitites, or modules that you can choose to add or remove
10. Add ability to add plugin modules to add core functionality ie: add CFSILLY tag to tags available to every page and administrate this on a per site basis (sandboxable)
11. Bundle jBuddy IM with CF
12. 2d and other barcodes and Microsoft Tag
13. Reduce the footprint of jrun or replace it with something leaner
14. Free limited tag/feature version of CF
15. GroupCurrentRow variable like currentRow variable when group= is used for cfoutput and cfloop
16. tweak to treat an empty string as a null value on function argument collections

[Mark Drew]

Aha, I guess these are a lot to do with Adobe CF explicitly. 

Although I have some questions. Why Glassfish rather than tomcat? I shall have to try and sieve through a few of these since they aren't relevant to Railo. 

Many Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Mark Drew]

These are all definately good ideas. Although I am not sure the Java dotnet bridge is something anyone has eve asked for. 

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Stefan]

 I would like to see CF moving closer and closer to javascript in terms of syntax and coding. It has moved a lot the recent years, but I think the closer it gets, the more new users will find their way here rather than into the darkness of PHP. 

Also, scopes... 'this' is completely messed up

[Dawesi]

used to be my wishlist for ColdFusion... now I use Railo mostly. ;-)

Officially gave up on ColdFusion during last alpha/beta cycle.

[Dawesi]

glassfish is tomcat on steroids... either is ok I guess, glassfish just has more functionality out of the box.

Chris

[Mark Drew]

Sure, but what functionality related to Railo or people using Railo?

One of the issues we encountered with Glassfish is that there doesn't seem to be a way to serve documents from a folder outside of Glassfish. 

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Matt Quackenbush]

I am not attempting to start a flame war or otherwise troll - quite the opposite, actually, but I think that the very last thing Railo should even consider at this moment is *any* attempt to be like ACF. Railo is the future of CFML, but only because it has chosen to do things the right way instead of the ACF way. Railo needs to continue to forge ahead, and leave ACF behind. Fix the language. Don't attempt to placate "disgruntled ACF developers". If they're that disgruntled, use the opportunity to help guide them to be better developers. Developers become better by learning more about _languages_, not by using the latest "let's hide anything and everything real from you so you don't have any understanding about what you're doing" fluff that ACF has long since become known for being so in love with. Leave that stupidity for the boardroom sales pitches that Adobe seem to be so fond of. (Ooooh!  Look Mom! No hands!  Ugh.)

NO FLUFF! KEEP RAILO LEAN AND MEAN!

[Peter Boughton]

Dawesi wrote:
> glassfish is tomcat on steroids... either is ok I guess, glassfish just has
> more functionality out of the box.

To be clear, GlassFish is a full JEE application server, so same as JBoss AS and Jetty Hightide.

It is apparently the reference implementation of JEE, and uses a variant of Tomcat for its servlet engine.

Railo should certainly support GlassFish, (and given the above I'd expect it does already).

I don't see the benefit to distributing GlassFish with Railo instead of Tomcat, because:
1) most people don't need the extra bloat
2) those that do should know what to do


(If it was seen as useful to do, there'd still be the question of why GlassFish vs others.)

[Stefan]

I agree with this. Some of the original CF solutions was maybe a good idea at the time, when web development was a novelty and the developers was often beginners without much previous experience of programming. It was usually about putting form data into a database and present that data at a later stage. It is not like that anymore, we build very complex stuff and some of the ACF heritage  is making it more difficult to keep the big projects tidy than it needs to be. Maybe version 5.0 should be "bye bye Adobe"?

It is time for CF to grow up and in a grown up CF, CFML is not needed.

[James Lamar]

"the darkness of PHP". that's funny :) My buddy, a PHP predominate programmer, always kid each other and he likes to ask me how me and the other CF developer are doing.

While I'm all for moving forward with CF I'm not sure I understand exactly how CF and CFML are much different. Someone mentioned we won't need CFML at some point. Maybe that could be explained to me.

Here is what I think as an intermediate developer who started as hacker/designer.

ColdFusion is hands down the easiest language to start with for web development and it needs to remain compatible with the idea of "less effort" or less learning curve. That doesn't mean we dummy it down till you make it hard to do advanced things, just that we keep in mind what makes a language successful...USERS!

Without a strong base of users we don't have anything, but a "dying" language. While I would never choose PHP over CF, one thing PHP does have is a nice user base. If we're talking high-level about the future of CF and Railo then we need to "win" some of that user base. There are lots of ways to do it, but we need to start with the most painful points for developers and make them easy. Railo has already done a lot of this by being free, offering commercial support when needed, having a nice admin dashboard and of course using CFML. I think the GIT ideas are great. We can never have too good of documentation either. 

We also need to be a supportive community of developers by being patient with new ideas or new developers. I've found that there are a few REALLY helpful people in the community, but there are plenty wounded programmers out there who like to crap on novice mistakes and talk over people's heads. That being said, I have heard from new CF developers that our community is outstanding compared to others, I just think we can do better.

[Todd Rafferty]

This has been there since CF9 documentation.

[Adam Cameron]

On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 3:03:59 AM UTC+1, James Lamar wrote:

While I'm all for moving forward with CF I'm not sure I understand exactly how CF and CFML are much different. Someone mentioned we won't need CFML at some point. Maybe that could be explained to me.

Well CF (ColdFusion) is the app server and it serves up code written in the CFML language.  That's the difference.

Railo and OpenBD also serve up CFML, but they are not ColdFusion.

Some people in the Railo and OpenBD refer to CF as "ACF", which has never made much sense to me.  Not least of all because Adobe themselves (nor anyone outside of these subcommunities) ever refers to CF as ACF.  Also it's slightly redundant: there's no other sort of ColdFusion other than Adobe's one, so there's not need to qualify "ColdFusion" as "Adobe ColdFusion" any more than there's a need to say "Railo Railo" or "Alan Williamson OpenBD".

 

ColdFusion is hands down the easiest language to start with for web development and it needs to remain compatible with the idea of "less effort" or less learning curve. That doesn't mean we dummy it down till you make it hard to do advanced things, just that we keep in mind what makes a language successful...USERS!

Definitely agree here. It'd also be good to keep the divisiveness in the community to a minimum, bearing in mind that be it Railo, CF or OpenBD, we're all in this together.  The community is small enough as it is, without some of the posturing I see going on between the sub-communities (generally directed at Adobe, rather than between Railo and OpenBD, granted).

 

We also need to be a supportive community of developers by being patient with new ideas or new developers. I've found that there are a few REALLY helpful people in the community, but there are plenty wounded programmers out there who like to crap on novice mistakes and talk over people's heads. That being said, I have heard from new CF developers that our community is outstanding compared to others, I just think we can do better.

I agree with this too.  There are a lot of people with blogs out there, and these are people who are considered "big names" in the CFML community (disclosure: I have a CF blog, but I am not a big name ;-).  However I never or rarely see these people helping out on the various public forums (the Adobe ones, this one, OpenBD or StackOverflow to name the ones I keep an eye on) where people are actually needing - and taking the time to ask for - help.  To me most of the "big names" spend most of their time working on their reputation, rather than working to help the community.  It'd be great if that could change.  That said, I think the buy-in to this specific forum from people involved in Railo is pretty good.  But I think there's a broader CFML community out there that they could also be helping, but seldom do.  It seems a bit inward-looking at times.

I really think it's good that Railo is breathing live and momentum into CFML, and - given I'm more involved in ColdFusion than I am with Railo - I'm gonna try to influence Adobe to have some of this momentum rub off on them.  The CFML community will be better off the stronger all the vendors are.

--
Adam

[Jean Moniatte]

I am not sure who is in your big name list, but the Railo people are hyper active on the list. Top posters this month:

48 Mark Drew

32 Michael Offner

29 Igal

22 Peter Boughton

20 JoshuaIRL

19 Gary Stanton

19 Adam Cameron

18 Puc Covelli

I do not think that we can get better help or support than that!

Thanks,

Jean

--

Jean Moniatte

UGAL

je...@ugal.com

www.ugal.com

[Adam Cameron]

I think you stopped reading halfway through the para that you're commenting on, which goes on to say "[...] I think the buy-in to this specific forum from people involved in Railo is pretty good."

I would definitely say that Peter Boughton is a bit of a champ when it comes to cross-platform help.  And I do what I can (seeing you list me in there too).  But the rest of the guys I see helping out here a lot, but not so much outside these four walls (the metaphorical ones, surrounding the Railo community.  Keeping you guys safely penned up ;-).  I could be wrong though: I do not note down everyone's name that helps on various forums, and perhaps I don't look at the right forums.  It's just a gut feeling.

I will not mention names, but there are a number of very high profile bloggers whose names I very rarely see helping on and CFML-oriented forums.

I know I must come across as an ingrate, and I know all those dudes you list do a huge amount of work for Railo (and they've all helped me, even when I tend to rark people up.  Sorry Mark), but from my position outside the various vendor-specific silos, I see it as a bigger picture than just "Railo" or "ColdFusion" or "OpenBD".

--
Adam

[Andrew Penhorwood]

Personally I love tags.  I use tag more then cfscript.  But I don't have a problem with cfscript. Now before everyone jumps on me for being some HTML fan boy.  I started programming in 1980.  I know 20+ languages to include a few versions of Assembler.  So I have a classic programming background but I find the tag part of CFML very fun to use.  So before we shoot CFML make sure that its users what it to be shot.

Andrew Penhorwood

[Adam Cameron]

I guess, Andrew, you are translating Stefan's comment - "It is time for CF to grow up and in a grown up CF, CFML is not needed." - to mean that the tags in CFML have had their day?  I struggled to work out what that sentence meant, but ultimately came to that conclusion.

My reaction to Stefans's comment (which I meant to make y/day, but I got bogged down with arrays):
* To be pendantic, the entire language, including tags and script elements is CFML.  CFML does not just refer to the tags.
* Tags are a very good fit in situations wherein one needs to mix logic with mark-up (eg: a view).  Indeed a far better fit than using writeOutput() to output mark-up, or chopping and changing between CFScript blocks and mark-up.  Obviously one should separate logic from output as much as poss, but even views need logic in them quite often.
* I use script in other situations though, because it doesn't make sense to me to use tags in code where there's no mark-up.  For non-embedded code they're a bit clunky.
* CFML is all the more richer for having both tag- and script-based syntax.
* One thing Adobe have yet to get right is when functionality should be expressed as a function (so right for both script and tags) or as a tag.  They seem to still err towards exposing functionality as tags in the first instance, and then doing something about it in a script-able fashion after that.  They need to stop doing that.  <cfspreadsheet> is a prime example of something that should never have been a tag in the first place.  And all the MS Exchange integration.  Why the hell was that done as tags?  I'm not familiar-enough with any Railo-only functionality to know how good they are in this area.

--
Adam

On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:18:24 PM UTC+1, Andrew Penhorwood wrote:

Personally I love tags.  I use tag more then cfscript.  But I don't have a problem with cfscript. Now before everyone jumps on me for being some HTML fan boy.  I started programming in 1980.  I know 20+ languages to include a few versions of Assembler.  So I have a classic programming background but I find the tag part of CFML very fun to use.  So before we shoot CFML make sure that its users what it to be shot.

Andrew Penhorwood

On Monday, September 17, 2012 1:45:07 PM UTC-4, Stefan wrote:

[...]

[Seay, Walter]

I would like to see the addition of at least JSR-168, JSR-286 portlet components.  Similar but better than ACF.

 

Walter Seay

Integration Specialist

Eisenhower Medical Center

39000 Bob Hope Drive

Rancho Mirage, CA  92270

760-340-3911 x:5977

[Peter Boughton]

Adam wrote:
> there's no other sort of ColdFusion other than Adobe's one

Except, in the eyes of many, Railo is ColdFusion and OpenBD is ColdFusion, and for an even larger/overlapping bunch CFML is ColdFusion

They're wrong/inaccurate of course, but they still exist (as evidenced above), so I feel it's useful to be extra clear in some situations.

 > I have a CF blog, but I am not a big name

I dunno, five syllables seems pretty big. ;o)

Jean wrote:
> I am not sure who is in your big name list, but the Railo people are hyper active on the list.

Was part-way through responding to this when Adam's reply came in (never been called a champ before, yay), but to expand a bit on what he's saying, and to relate to the earlier point about attracting developers and growing CFML...

Each time the whole "CF is dead" thing comes up, people always complain about the bad perception - that others don't see the great community we have.

I see it the other way round - the community doesn't show itself to the outside world - and that's probably the only way the perception has any chance of changing.

Stack Overflow is a perfect example - SO has done to programming help sites what Google did to search engines a decade and a half ago; it has become the de facto place to ask questions - but relatively few people in the CFML community are asking and answering questions there.

It's not just about SO though - Wikipedia is another place that the CFML community basically ignores, and one that also highlights how little the CFML community interacts with the rest of the programming community.
There was recently a proposal to delete the articles for Fusebox and ColdBox, because they were considered non-notable (even after a search for appropriate references).  Considering an outsider's perspective, it's not at all surprising (indeed, perhaps the only surprising thing is that other frameworks which are less defensible have so far escaped similar nominations) - because there's very little outside the CFML community about these things to demonstrate their notability.

Something Stack Overflow and Wikipedia have in common is almost always being on the first page - if not in the top three results - for relevant searches, so they are perfect places for CFML developers to show others what the CFML ecosystem & community is like, and yet...

 Anyhow, I've rambled on for long enough, and this is getting off-topic for this thread, so I'll stop here.

[Adam Cameron]

> there's no other sort of ColdFusion other than Adobe's one

Except, in the eyes of many, Railo is ColdFusion and OpenBD is ColdFusion, and for an even larger/overlapping bunch CFML is ColdFusion

They're wrong/inaccurate of course, but they still exist (as evidenced above), so I feel it's useful to be extra clear in some situations.

Yeah, I know.  I guess I'm more one to "educate" not "accommodate".  But there are bigger fish to fry.  I think my apprehension of the "ACF" monniker is that it's often used almost derisively, which seems unnecessary.

 > I have a CF blog, but I am not a big name

I dunno, five syllables seems pretty big. ;o)

Hehhehheh.  Indeed yes.  I think my blog has the most pointlessly long domain name out there, if nothing else:  adamcameroncoldfusion.blogspot.co.uk.  My first name's actually Donald, so perhaps I should remap it to donaldadamcameroncoldfusion (etc), then I could truly make a claim to be the biggest name in ColdFusion blogging ;-).  Ben Forta and his paltry "forta.com" looks decidedly bush-league by comparison!

--
donaldadamcameron

[Mark Drew]

Wouldn't that just be a feature of whatever app you are using spring with (the other way round, rather than something Railo does?) 

Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

On 18 Sep 2012, at 04:57, DL <dere...@hotmail.com> wrote:

A nice feature is to be able to integrate railo with Spring and use CFML as the view layer.

[Brad Wood]

> A nice feature is to be able to integrate railo with Spring and use CFML as the view layer.

You may well know this, but there are already a handful of robust ioc/DI tools written in CFML.  ColdSpring and WireBox are probably the most-used.

Thanks!

~Brad

ColdBox Platform Evangelist

Ortus Solutions, Corp 

E-mail: br...@coldbox.org

ColdBox Platform: http://www.coldbox.org 

Blog: http://www.codersrevolution.com

[Mark Drew]

Hi there

My name is Mark Drew, and I work at Railo, as one of the directors no less ( look at me with all my fancy titles!) 

So, one of the things that has come up is that I am not helping in Stack Overflow and other sites. And this IS TRUE. I agree Adam, since it's true. It is just a matter of not having the time. I make this forum a priority over other ones since it is close to my alma matter, and I unsubscribed from a number of forums a while back simply because of the lack of bandwidth I have. 

Recently I have very little time, since I am preparing 100 things (it seems) for the release of Railo 4.

With regards to ACF, I have to say that is an internal (non derogatory) nickname we give the Adobe(r) ColdFusion(tm) product since it's much shorter than saying Adobe(r) ColdFusion(tm). The same way we call Railo Server: Railo, rather than Railo Server. And this name seems to have leaked out and become more in use in this forum. 

ACF is used (by me, Gert, Micha and most of the team in the Railo Team List) just to talk about Adobe(r) ColdFusion(tm) and just as a shortcut. 

Another point (of history I guess) is that we (as a company) have been polite and respectful competition about Adobe, despite the opposite not always having been true. (There is a decree within the company about that since I joined. Just ask Gert)

Anyway, I hope that once a few things have settled I shall have more time to help people outside my primary groups.

Warm Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Jake Hand]

My head may be in the clouds on this one, but if there were a tool in the Railo Administrator to easily get to the bottom of memory "leaks" that would be so cool.

I realize taking heap dumps and analyzing them with tools like Eclipse MAT can be fairly straightforward when you're just serving a couple applications from a Server instance, but when you have a couple hundred different applications on a server, it can be a bit difficult to find the culprit(s). I realize something like this is probably more within the scope of what

the Intergral and Webapper teams provide, but I just thought I'd contribute my two cents.

Cheers,

Jake Hand

Hostek.com

[Mark Drew]

You mean something like this?

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Jake Hand]

Why yes, very much so...I can't believe I didn't see that beta application while it was available. (excuse my ignorance) 

So the question is - do we get that in Railo 4? I don't see it in the beta.

Jake Hand

Hostek.com

[Mark Drew]

It is currently in beta but it is an extension that you can get from our preview providers (under the Server Administrator) 

http://preview.getrailo.org/ExtensionProvider.cfc

They will be commercial extensions when released 

Regards

Mark Drew
 
Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
+44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

[Michael Zock]

On Thursday, September 20, 2012 7:43:56 AM UTC+2, Mark Drew wrote:

It is currently in beta but it is an extension that you can get from our preview providers (under the Server Administrator) 

http://preview.getrailo.org/ExtensionProvider.cfc

They will be commercial extensions when released 

Sounds like a good companion to some Integral products.

[Bruce Kirkpatrick]

I don't know if I'm unique, but I prefer to write most application type features from scratch even if plugins or open source projects exist for them.   I just want a language to be fast and reliable and be able to handle the complexities of I/O in the best way for me.  However, after building a single CFML framework/application for the last 9 years, I think I've got a lot of great features in my applications that may benefit others if they were part of the railo server or extensions.  Plus there are areas where other languages are still better suited, which Railo could choose to include to be more of a swiss army knife for any server based app.

1: Add strict typing if it would improve performance. This would include adding new data type keywords/functions that are closer to the underlying data types that have to be manually cast if type must be changed.  For example, look at how javascript is starting to include new data types to enable higher performance in webgl with typed arrays, http://www.khronos.org/registry/typedarray/specs/latest/    I know we can use java objects within CFML.  What I don't know is if that is faster or if array operations on a java objects are no different from a CFML array operation.   Isn't there wasted memory when you have a more generic struct/array object that can accept strings, numbers, boolean, objects, etc.  I'm asking to eliminate all that memory overhead somehow and have simple data and be able to enforce it when it is passed into CFML functions, but only if it is proven to be faster or can somehow be made into parallel code better.

2: Enable creation of socket servers via application or server scope cacheable CFML components that can outperform node.js or others - I haven't actually tested any of the early extensions compared to node.js, but it seems like there is work on websockets and maybe other extensions are in an alpha state right now which may not be done in the 4.0 release schedule.  I'd like to see those get finished to a high level of performance very soon so I can consider using railo for a low latency multiplayer game server or other real-time apps.  Ideally, make it easy to replace them while the server is running and yet still bind them to different ports.

3. enable compiling CFML into other languages.  I noticed the Haxe language lets you use strict typing to generate php or javascript, which seems like a novel idea if it is performant.  A lot of us have concerns about php vs CFML vs javascript occasionally and if you could easily switch between all of those, it would be irrelevant at that point.  It also makes debugging a little easier if a lot of the syntax is validated and enforced by another language, especially if the other language has stricter syntax.  node.js likes to claim how great it is to use one language for client side and server side.   What if you could write CFML that generates javascript for you? Or what if railo was able to compile its java classes from javascript source?  It doesn't have to use V8 like node.js, but perhaps V8 has some benefits if it was integrated.  The long-lived java server with dynamic class loading, threading and fast shared memory abilities of railo make it superior to V8 for certain things, but perhaps it is far more heavy and less suited for applications in need of asynchronous I/O currently compared to node.js.   Perhaps the new javascript version would abandon the tag concepts in favor of just a single method of writing for railo.  It is a bit annoying to have 2 types of syntax in CFML even though both are easy to understand for an experienced developer.

4. Make it possible to execute low level commands on mysql like their C api or via a new native driver perhaps which would allow asynchronous queries.  We can currently fake this using <cfthread>, but perhaps a built-in option would be more memory efficient and faster.  For example in PHP, an unbufferred query with mysqlnd uses about half the memory and completes in about half the time.  I'd like to be able to set callback methods for processing all I/O.   CF/Railo has to return a complete result, turn it into an object and then you loop over that object.   I'd like to have an additional set of functions that let you setup a much more fine grained database connection for some added performance.   I often use code generation techniques to automate verbose high performance techniques.  If I had this low level api, then I would generate each query as a cfc that sits in shared memory, so that it would just have the overhead of a function call and the full performance of the low level api.

5. Make it possible for most of the I/O tags to be non-blocking via using techniques similar to how node.js handles I/O. CFHTTP, CFFTP, CFFILE, CFQUERY, etc. For example, what if <cfquery> had async="yes" callback="processQuery" attributes.  We'd have to reorganize the application so that it doesn't complete a request until the last callback is done processing, but this may improve throughput under high load because I believe it is possible to put threads in a deeper sleep state after they complete their work and while they are waiting for I/O callback events.  If this was done in pure java, it might be faster when the server is under high load compared to <cfthread>?   Web server developers claim they beat the C10k problem using these kinds of techniques.  The node.js guy says it better then I can on his youtube presentations about node.js architecture.  I think it is important not only for high load web servers, but also to combat DDOS attacks and abusive behavior since the more load you can handle, the less likely an attacker will be able to fully saturate the server with too many requests.  I'm always scared that the big heavy java process is going to get clobbered the first time I have a big attack.  I have a configuration that has been tested on apachebench up to 1000 simultaneous and it is stable afterwards, but it is fairly easy to crash railo with apachebench under a certain amount of load & certain memory/connection configurations.  I don't know what a real DDOS attack would do.  If there are any ways to mitigate DDOS attacks within railo, that would be a nice feature.  Railo is able to track state better since it has all those shared scopes, etc.  I already have detection for excessively fast connections and I clear out the session memory automatically when that happens and block them for a while.  For example 50 CFML HTTP requests in a minute is obviously abusive.  I also have limits set on iptables connections, tomcat and apache to help. 

6. It seems like 64 bit numbers coming from JDBC / mysql bigint columns need extra manual conversion to retain precision and this is intentional to maintain ACF compatibility.  Perhaps we could have an option on how to treat bigint columns in railo admin so that we can preserve 64-bit precision with less code.  I wanted to use 64-bit numbers via the uuid_short() function in mysql to have unique ids that are server id specific so you could have do master/master replication without worrying about unique key errors.  It is easier to handle this in other languages that are more low-level with the database access.

My applications are getting close to the point where my entire html based web site functions like a desktop app with micro ajax updates and transitions.  My company site is built on my custom CFML framework and is using a lot of the most modern techniques including html 5, pushstate,  responsive web design for the front-end.  On the server side, I have an extremely efficient custom application where nearly everything is cached in railo shared memory scopes so that there is very little disk activity.  I want my ajax requests to have the least overhead possible so it feels like a seamless / instant desktop experience, so hopefully railo will keep its request startup and execution minimal and fast as it adds more features.   You can see this in action on my company web site:  https://www.farbeyondcode.com/

7. I don't know if <cfthread> is a heavyweight method of threading, but I'm guessing it is.   What if there was a way for you to perform parallel code operations by specifying an extra option or using new parallel functions.  For example, parallel sorting,  parallel math operations to arrays/structs,  parallel function callbacks and these new functions would use more efficient lightweight/threading commands which automatically handle thread management issue and complete with a single result.  Like if we had strict typing with new data types, perhaps it would be possible to have some of the vector operations become parallelized using cpu specific optimizations for multiple data operations like SSE, SIMD, and all that intel threading / parallel stuff that is available in the C++ world.  I don't know if java can utilize these optimizations.  In languages like C#, C++, you can use special compiler keywords or libraries to take advantage of more cpu cores for data processing.  I think all of us are using 4 to 16 core servers now and the cpu is sitting close to idle all the time.  I just need requests to finish faster, not to increase scale typically.   These improvements are much more useful if you are dealing with low-latency real-time socket connections.  I realize most people don't care about 10ms for a web page, but games only have 16ms to draw a frame and achieve 60 FPS, and you user input and AI / player reactions to be as close to a single frame as possible.   I currently plan on using node.js for my game server because it is easy and fast for websocket connections, but if Railo was further along with sockets, it would be better since I have 100k lines of code in CFML already.  Maybe when I'm more successful someday, I'd have time to build a C version, but initially I'd focus on what I know.  I want to start making simple free/cheap indie web games with a multiplayer component using web technologies like flash, html 5, etc.  I like writing fast code, because I want to have skills that are useful for writing efficient game code.

8. Perhaps add tags/functions that can parse CSS, javascript and html into CFML objects or a high performance non-blocking event stream with higher performance.  This would allow server-side processing of these without the tedious character by character approach I currently use.   I have already built my own css parser and html parser using cfml and php.  I did this to create my own template language and to convert html / css into strict valid syntax.   I want to enable developers with less skill to be able to upload their code and the system will insert the dynamic sections in place of the tag language.  It will also validate their input so that it is secure and prevents them from accessing the system in ways I haven't designed.  I also generate a sprite map from the CSS data and automatically insert the background-image, background-position code back into the css file.  Here is the spritemap for my company site, which is auto-generated with my own script when the css file changes:  https://www.farbeyondcode.com/images/zspritemap.jpg     -  Perhaps railo could have its own template language like I'm building.  I've built mine in a way that is similar to php's smarty.   However, railo is far superior in its ability to cache a CFC in shared memory.  My templates are "compiled" to a CFC that is cached in server or application scope.  This minimizes file i/o, and eliminates the overhead of parsing my templates.  I'd want a railo version of this functionality to be able to do all that and more.  Maybe the railo team should have a separate project that is actually the most complete and powerful CFML framework ever made, rather then try to build every feature into the server in a generic way.  Maybe you could create a set of conventions and standardize CFML development for the most modern techniques.   That would allow for a lean and mean version of railo, and a more heavy-weight version for that lets you have a full framework and tools.

9. If railo understood css, javascript and html syntax, then it could add other optimizations automatically in the future.  For example, css files could be served with data-uri,  sprite maps, valid syntax/alerts automatically.   HTML could be converted from xhtml to html 5 or a future standard by changing a server side option.  This would also make it easier to write javascript with CFML, since you could build the CFML javascript object and then there would be a built-in way to write it out to javascript.   The compilation process could be integrated with google's closure or yahoo YUI and support automatic minification and concatenation of all the external js files.  I have recently built this entire system of automating minify / concat and tracking file changes automatically on my company site.  It you look at the network tab in firebug/chrome inspector, you'll see the site has very few requests.   I'm just suggesting that railo have the ability to do more of this as a built-in feature so people don't need to be expert developers to build applications that follow all of the google pagespeed recommendations.  My site is currently scoring 96 of 100 on google pagespeed insights.  I've put hundreds of hours into correcting / automating all of those pagespeed changes across my sites.   Railo could choose to not only consider the server performance, but also how to make the front-end more efficient since I've found that as I have fully optimized my railo application, the front-end has become the bottleneck - i.e. deferred execution of javascript, fewer, smaller requests,  deferred loading of elements.   Perhaps these front-end ideas can be abstracted so that there is a consistent library available for railo developers which automates these tasks if you consistently use them.  I already make CFML function to generate a lot of the HTML / javascript syntax.  I automate the load-order and placement of this code by integrating it with my template system.  You need a lot of feature to achieve all that, but it works.   For example, instead of writing <script type="text/javascript" src="/myfile.js"></script>,  I have a skin component that I call request.zos.skin.includeJS("/myfile.js") in railo.  I also add version ids to the filename so that the browser is forced to download the file again.    This handles all the magic of minify/concat and the position that the file appears within the html code.  It also loads the file asynchronously via appending the script tag to the dom just before </body>.  I know someone was working on <cfstylesheet> and <cfjavascript> tags for railo in 2010, but I don't know if they are actively developed still.  I choose to write my own so that I had the ability to implement all the features I described in the most efficient way.  I handle the concatenation by using a separate function that groups files into "packages" so that I can still include individual files and benefit from the versioning and async loading.

Railo is really great how it is right now, but I think looking at node.js and c for ideas on sockets and non-blocking i/o is going to have the biggest impact on improving  what is possible with railo.   Adding framework type features to railo is less important to me, and just makes it a more complete solution.  Also anything that can be done to make server management and achieving continuous uptime would be great.  Perhaps an easy way to manage failover / high availability / shared configuration / synchronization.  I don't fully know what is available when attempting to cluster railo, since I currently use 1 instance, but I'd hope its really good whenever I get to the point of needing it.

[Andrew Penhorwood]

The memory management stuff looks great.  I heard there was some code analysis (execution time) in the works too.  Is that true?

I would welcome anything to do with unit testing, code coverage in testing, speed of execution with maybe suggestions for better performance.

Andrew Penhorwood

[Mark Drew]

Hey Andrew... see my answers inline:

> The memory management stuff looks great. I heard there was some code analysis (execution time) in the works too. Is that true?

Yes there is.

>
> I would welcome anything to do with unit testing,

> code coverage in testing, speed of execution with maybe suggestions for better performance.

Yes there is.

;)

[Kunal Patel]

On Wednesday, September 12, 2012 8:52:53 PM UTC+5:30, Mark Drew wrote:
> Hi All! 
>
>
> As you all might have heard, Railo Technologies, the company behind Railo Server is becoming larger. As part of this move, and our focusing more efforts in developing a better platform for your applications, we are forming a Technical Development Advisory Committee. The members and roles to this committee are yet to be defined but it's main focus is to look at the features and roadmap for Railo Server. 
>
>
> This is not just a bunch of people sitting in a smoke filled room, rubbing their hands and scheming, it's users and companies and , through community liaisons, YOU! 
>
>
> So, what would you like to see in future releases of Railo (we are thinking 4.5, 5.x, 6.x)? 
>
>
> We appreciate your ideas of course! Do try not to say things like "a fix for bug XYZ" but more keep it to features. 
>
>
> For example, one of the features I am thinking (and working on adding as an extension) personally is having a noSQL document and graph database already built into Railo! 
>
>
> Now's YOUR turn!
>
>
>
>

> Mark Drew
>  
> Railo Technologies Professional Open Source
> skype: mark_railo ma...@getrailo.com
> +44 7971 852296 http://www.getrailo.com

Hello Sir,

I am running 15 employee software company and working mainly on JAVA , SPRING , HIBERNATE technology products. I come to know about this technology from one of my team member and looks very interested. I m trying to find out how this can be useful in our products.

Currently we are using Tomcat and Glassfish Server. How can we replace this with RAILO and WHY ?

I am not able to find good documentation explaining what is it exactly and why we should use this. And then I found this post from google.

If you have some time to us to explain what is it exactly and why we should drop tomact or glassfish and go with this one. then we will be very thankful to you.

Thnak You.

[Billy Cravens]

Railo doesn't replace Tomcat or Glassfish. Railo runs atop JEE servers, allowing you to build applications using CFML and cfscript. Most would find that CFML and cfscript are easier and faster to build applications in.


Billy Cravens
bdcr...@gmail.com

On Aug 26, 2013, at 1:12 AM, Kunal Patel <ku...@swingitservices.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Sir,
>
> I am running 15 employee software company and working mainly on JAVA , SPRING , HIBERNATE technology products. I come to know about this technology from one of my team member and looks very interested. I m trying to find out how this can be useful in our products.
>
> Currently we are using Tomcat and Glassfish Server. How can we replace this with RAILO and WHY ?
>
> I am not able to find good documentation explaining what is it exactly and why we should use this. And then I found this post from google.
>
> If you have some time to us to explain what is it exactly and why we should drop tomact or glassfish and go with this one. then we will be very thankful to you.
>
> Thnak You.
>

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[James Kilford]

Take a look at this page in the docs:

https://github.com/getrailo/railo/wiki/Railo-server-compared-with-Java

It gives comparisons between Railo and Java techniques, and lists some of the pros and cons of each.

For some background information and a description of what Railo is, look here:

https://github.com/getrailo/railo/wiki/Getting-to-know-Railo-Server

Hope that's of use!

James

[john Matlock]

On Wednesday, September 12, 2012 8:22:53 AM UTC-7, Mark Drew wrote:

Hi All! 

As you all might have heard, Railo Technologies, the company behind Railo Server is becoming larger. As part of this move, and our focusing more efforts in developing a better platform for your applications, we are forming a Technical Development Advisory Committee. The members and roles to this committee are yet to be defined but it's main focus is to look at the features and roadmap for Railo Server. 

 

I would like to see a couple of new tags:

 

<cfdebug> -- would essentially do the following:

 

<cfparam name="Debug" Default="0">

<cfif Debug>

<cfoutput>

Template Name/Line Number -- Var1:#Var1#; Var2:#Var2#<br>

</cfoutput>

</cfif>

 

I could do this as a custom function or tag if I knew how to get the Template Name and Line Number.

 

 

<cfinsite> or <cfmonitor> or some other name.

 

Do essentially the same thing as <cf_siteinsite> from www.eswsoftware.com.  That is, display who is accessing your server, what browser, from what country,how many pages they've viewed, what page they last downloaded, how long ago did they request that page, etc.  This will show that Googlebot has been on your site for two days and looked at 5,000 pages.

 

BUT:

cf_siteinsite costs money (only $10 USD, but still a cost and you have to find it,

cf_siteinsite has bugs so you have to spend time getting it to work and digging into my own code is

     bad enough without looking at someone elses,

cf_siteinsite was last updated in 2006 and could stand some updating and expansion.

 

Documentation -- A bunch said already.  What I would really like to see are examples showing common usage on the tag and function references in the Railo administrator.

 

I hope these suggestions aren't too silly, I'm a beginner with Railo.

 

John Matlock

 

 

[James Kilford]

I would like to see a separate administration URL that would allow you to administrate all the various contexts for a server.

Many thanks, 

James

On 12 September 2012 16:22, Mark Drew <ma...@getrailo.com> wrote:

Hi All! 

As you all might have heard, Railo Technologies, the company behind Railo Server is becoming larger. As part of this move, and our focusing more efforts in developing a better platform for your applications, we are forming a Technical Development Advisory Committee. The members and roles to this committee are yet to be defined but it's main focus is to look at the features and roadmap for Railo Server. 

[Kunal Patel]

So this means instead of developing application in JAVA Technologies we can switch over to RAILO language  Is that kind of programming language. If yes then why should we use it ? can u please post some benefits.

I am sorry if I m being mean then. I just found this interesting and we are running some products currently in SPRING HIBERNATE ( JAVA ) enviourment but its being very slow for us. and looking for some good point to increase our speed.

Please let me know.

Thank You.

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[Nando Breiter]

You should be able to develop comparable web applications faster in Railo. There isn't really a disadvantage in your case, because if Railo doesn't provide the functionality you need and Java does, you can always "drop down" into Java from within the Railo programming environment. I've done that on occasion where I found the Railo (ColdFusion) equivalent functionality too slow (I was doing image processing on thousands of images and needing a reasonable page load time, for instance), but cases like this are probably rare.

Aria Media Sagl
Via Rompada 40
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Switzerland

+41 (0)91 600 9601
+41 (0)76 303 4477 cell
skype: ariamedia

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/railo/CANns%3DYknLs9kcj_Sf99cjoGEm2JJhLhhsDdcbPYNC4gdaQ6w9Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[Bruce Kirkpatrick]

Have you profiled your application to determine if it is disk I/O, database I/O, or actually the language performance that is affecting you?    Java should be faster or the same as Railo in real world application performance.   Railo would make working with shared memory take less code, so you could have a lot of object caching, but that is something you can do in Java.   It is probably a lot cheaper to look at adding more caching solutions to your Java app and rewriting the slowest parts.  Maybe hibernate and ORM should not always be used especially if you are concerned with performance.  You could write some of your queries manually, and handle them with the fastest, most minimal SQL / data structures.  

Most slowdowns in my app are because of the database.  It is pretty easy to make the language processing faster by pre-processing some of the common data and storing it in memory, but if a query must stay dynamic, that query will be 90% of the request time no matter what language I use.  

If you had a real language performance bottleneck, it might be because you are reloading too much of the data on each request.  Instead of doing redundant work, you could design those objects to be thread-safe when multiple threads reuse them.   If you find this difficult to do in Java, you could think about using CFML since it's not very hard in CFML, because of dynamic language and simple syntax. 

If you had infinite resources, you'd probably be able to write a Java app that is better then one built with Railo.   Maybe some parts of Java are harder to understand, and that would prevent you from finding the time / expertise to implement those features correctly.  I don't have the time to implement my app in Java, so I'm forced to use CFML, PHP or another dynamic language.   Facebook builds some of their core services with faster languages like C++, but for the simple work that isn't so important, they still use php.  You need to measure the parts that are really slow and just rewrite those probably.  The application design is probably the problem, not the language.

Regards,