Lucee on Jetty bundles the Jetty server with the Lucee CFML engine,
cleanly configured using the home/base functionality in Jetty 9, and extensively documented.
The main aim is to provide a Lucee package that is a simple unzip-and-run to get
started, whilst providing a fully functional and capable web server, and also
making it clear how everything works to allow it to be adapted as needed.
This first release is v0.5 because I don't consider it sufficiently complete yet
- it all works fine, but doesn't yet contain everything I feel it should - for
example, HTTPS has not been configured and documented, and whilst Jetty itself
does support HTTPS and there's nothing stopping anyone consulting the Jetty docs
and setting it up, this project is about reducing that work.
So for development use it's fine, if you don't need HTTPS or are willing to
configure it yourself, go ahead - otherwise I hope to get what I consider a
complete v1.0 ready as soon as time permits, but didn't want to delay releasing
what I've done so far.
Downloads are available from the Lucee on Jetty project page; there's a
documentation wiki at GitHub, and the template for building bundles in
the GitHub repo .
As ever, I welcome any feedback or questions you might have - please use the
issue tracker.
Lucee is the best CFML engine.
Nine years ago I began a blog article with a similar claim, and set out to
explain why Railo was at that time the best CFML engine. Well the simplest proof
of Lucee taking the crown is that Lucee is a fork of Railo by its original
creator, Michael Offner.
The thing that made Railo great and that Lucee will be taking further is in
being a CFML engine written for developers. That is to say, with features added
through developers saying "I need feature X to do my job better" - and
specifically not via vague ideas decided on by product managers getting
feedback from non-technical clients who say "we need to do mobile" and then
having a bunch of disconnected non-programmers come up with a horrendously buggy
and useless mess called cfclient. Eugh!
Good programmers already know what tools they need to achieve certain tasks,
and if those tools don't exist or aren't good enough, they need the ability to
create/improve them - that is what Micha gave us with Railo, and Lucee promises
to take this further - to make it even easier for the developer community to
adapt it to their needs.
Bering a fork, Lucee continues the versioning from Railo, launching tonight with
Lucee 4.5 available already, and an excellent Lucee 5 just around the corner.
Why Not Railo?
Many will be wondering why fork Railo, instead of working on what was there, and
the best way to answer that is simply to refer to what Brad Wood has already
written on the Railo mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/railo/B_1S3WzVPXY/hlIeZDE1u98J
To re-iterate the key points: this is the original Railo developer, taking the
Railo source code, and refreshing the project. Don't mistake for division what
is actually an inclusive evolution, and importantly: a sign of exciting things
to come!
Lucee 5
With the next release, Lucee will bring incredible flexibility to CFML and JVM
developers through a couple of key technologies.
OSGi is a modular platform for the JVM which allows only
the necessary libraries to be loaded. So if, for example, you don't use
Hibernate, it doesn't get included and wont add any overhead. Railo was already
lightweight, and Lucee with OSGi will take this even further.
JSR223 or
"Scripting for the Java Platform" is a standard for embedding different languages
on the JVM, and what this means is being able to use Lucee to write CFML in far
more places than before. A good example is Ant build scripts - doing certain
things with Ant can be awkward and convoluted and Lucee 5 will allow embedding
CFML which makes those same tasks trivial.
Together these bring some great opportunies, and this is only the beginning...
More Info
I've tried to avoid simply parrotting what others have already written, so to
get further details on Lucee's launch and future you should definitely check out
Mark Drew's blog post,
Adam Cameron's blog post,
the thread started by Igal on the Railo list,
and of course the official Lucee website: lucee.org.
