A while ago I wrote an entry about why people should consider Railo. Well, with the Release Candidate for version 2.0, there comes a lot more reasons for using Railo. And here are twenty of them...

In the near future I'll be getting myself a dedicated server, and decided to find out if anyone would be interested if I was to setup Railo hosting on it. So, I posted on the CF-Talk mailing list to see if anyone was interested, and crikey, what a reaction I got! The discussion is currently the longest in the past four dozen threads.

The first few replies basically boiled down to was "why would anyone want Railo hosting?!?".

Tempting as it is to reply with "Railo PWNS U l4m3rz!", I've decided that I'll instead explain why I choose Railo, over all the other CFML engines available (CFMX, BlueDragon and Smith being the significant alternatives).

However, to prevent me from rambling on for hours about how wonderful Railo is -- and I really could talk about it all day -- I am simply going to pick just five things that should help to show what attracts me to Railo.

Read on.

The latest version of Railo is now available as a public beta from the Railo customer center, and it brings with it an exciting new feature: Resources.

Resources are a brilliant feature that allows you to perform file actions on virtual filesystems such as in memory, ZIP archives, and FTP sites.

Read on to find out more.

Okay, so I've arrived back from the UK's first* ColdFusion developers' conference (*if you ignore the previous two UK-based CF conferences), and decided I would give my thoughts about it.

I have created a simple custom verb which allows you to link specified resource files from circuit.xml, without having to go to the bother of writing it all in a script and including it.

For example, you can do this:

<cf:link resource="/res/bubbles.css"/>
<cf:link resource="/res/bubbles.js"/>

And it will convert that and place the following inside your HTML head:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/res/bubbles.css"/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/res/bubbles.js"></script>

This should be useful if you have a lot of different circuits that all have unique styles and scripts, and you'd rather avoid putting lots of conditional statements in your layout pages.

For more information and a download link, read the article.