Railo really is fast!

April 02, 2009

I've had a few hours spare so thought I'd see for myself if Railo is as fast as I've heard. Well, after running a few of my own mini applications I can backup the claims.

I decided to try out a fairly simple application that uses ColdSpring, Transfer & Fusebox frameworks. I've always found that applications that make heavy use of cfcs tend to be slow to initialise, but on my laptop running side by side with CF8.0.1 developer edition, Railo 3.1beta (which has the fantastic codename Barry) is noticeably quicker.

Getting Railo up and running is as simple as downloading the beta from the Railo site (as a zip archive) and extracting the files. Once extracted, you just run "start.bat" and that's it!

Fusebox, ColdSpring, ColdBox, Model Glue, Mach II and even CFWheels are all listed in the admin as extensions and are easily installed with a couple of clicks and will even set up the mappings for you.

I had expected to have some issues with Transfer as it isn't Railo isn't listed as a supported engine, but haven't hit any as yet (although my application is quite simple). That's not to say that I didn't have any problems, but they were all easily solved. If you write unit tests then you'll have no problems going through your application and making the required changes, and if you don't you really should think about it.

Obviously tuning your ColdFusion engine of choice is going to make a big difference and this is only a simple test of one user on a laptop running XP so hardly a realistic replica of a server environment. Hats off to the guys, Railo really is worth a serious look and having another cfml engine out there can only be good for the future of ColdFusion. As a result, I'm sure Adobe will respond by making ColdFusion 9 (sorry centaur) even better!

2 comments

  1. Are there any hosting providers with Railo I can check out ?

    Comment by Marios – April 09, 2009
  2. Hi Marios, I know that the guys at Railo are compiling a list of hosting providers at the moment, which should be announced soon (probably on the Railo blog www.railo.ch/blog/). />In the meantime it really is very easy to run on your own workstation without even needing to install if you just want to try it out.

    Comment by     John Whish – April 10, 2009

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