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: