Railo: Still Awesome!

It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!

So to start with, a quick summary of what Railo is:

• Railo, pronounced /ˈraɪ.ləʊ/, is super fast Enterprise-level sofware for RAD webapp and website creation.
• Railo is LGPL-licensed Free Software, so anyone can use it how they like.
• Railo runs on any Java EE server, (but doesn't require Java knowledge), and is a Jboss.org project.
• Railo uses the CFML language, like Adobe ColdFusion (the primary CFML engine), OpenBlueDragon, and others.
• Railo is really awesome.

I've been a fan of Railo for many years, but over the past year a lot of exciting things have been happening, and Railo has really taken off and proven itself a viable solution for rapid web development for everyone - from hobbyists to multi-national enterprises!

The Community mailing list has exploded with activity, so much so that we now have a dedicated volunteer Community Manager, Todd Rafferty, who helps to look after the community.

There's also the community-driven Railo Projects site, providing a variety of unofficial extensions to Railo, including: Railo Ajax led by Andrea Campolonghi, for easy CF-based Ajax apps; assorted extensions such as cfsvn, cfantrunner, etc; and Jordan Michaels' Vivio Installer, making Railo installation for Linux or Windows really easy.

The Railo wiki is now public, where the community can view and help update Railo-related documentation, resources, installation guides, and so on. It's still new and a lot still to do, but already it's shaping up to be a great source of information. There's also a railo-wiki mailing list for anyone who wants to help out with creating documentation.

We've had three big names in the CF community - Mark Drew, Sean Corfield, and Peter Bell - all joining the already excellent Railo Technologies team, helping to extend the cover of the commercial Railo Support and Consultancy services.

Railo has recently completed the JBoss ISV Partner process, and Red Hat's website lists Railo Inc as an ISV Partner, plus Railo as a supported product on both RedHat and JBoss platforms - an official stamp of approval from a renowned company, which no doubt will help promote further Railo growth.

Perhaps most rewarding of all, in a recent CF survey by TeraTech, we see that Railo is used by one in four of the people that responded, reflecting a high level of acceptance by the community.

And all of this is without even considering all the cool new features which are being continuously added to Railo - improved caching, custom built-in functions, cfc-based custom tags, and more!

If you're a web developer and you're not already using Railo, you really should take it for a spin. You're sure to be impressed!