Railo will rock the CFML world!

I watched the record Railo Open Source presentation yesterday, and I must say, it is the best thing that has happened in the CFML world!  Don’t you agree?

It is almost like what Firefox did to MS’s IE6.  Let’s challenge the big guy with something competitive and FREE!

It is wonderful to hear from Railo’s mouth that Adobe, Railo and OpenBD do work together to ensure CFML/cfscript consistence and high compatibility.  The last thing we CFML developers want is to remember a long list of what works which CFML engine and what not.  Thumbs up for the guys in that committee.

I like the direction Railo 3 open source is heading.  Every decisions they have made seem very smart.  I wish jBoss and Railo all the best, especially when it comes to marketing CFML to the JAVA/JSP crowd and beyond.  It’s time to improve the reputation of CFML!  I hope that one day when we tell people that we write CFML for a living, we won’t be looked down by our peers with questions like “Isn’t CF[ML] dead?”

Lastly, I’m not sure why they’re launching on March 31/April 1st though… would people take it seriously? ;-)

CF9 vs Railo3!  The fight of 2009!  Oh wait… is CF9 releasing this year?

The next interesting fight:  CFEclipse vs. Bolt.

Scalable solution for routing dynamically created sub-domain?

It is very common nowadays to have a sub-domain created upon a successful user registration.  How to write a web app that does that efficiently and easy to scale?

The most common solution is to insert a *.domain.com entry to the DNS server, and make use of mod-rewrite or look at CGI scope at the application level to determine the correct user.

However, what happen when you have a lot of users, and the single server *.domain.com is pointing to is not enough?

Someone suggested me to make use of a load balancer, but that will require some sort of clustering, and we all know how expensive that can cost in terms of hardware & software.  Most software requires a more expensive edition to support clustering.

What if, we borrow the idea of Partition in the DB world, and apply it to the whole stack (Application Server + File Server + SQL Server)?  It sounds like a good idea… but who’s responsible for directing traffic?

DNS seems to be the most logical place, since it can manage sub-domain easily with A-record’s.  However, inserting a new row into the zone file requires a DNS server restart (at least for BIND, the most common DNS server).  Although there is no hard limit on the file size of a zone file, requiring a restart for every new sub-domain entry seems rather crazy.  The loading of that potentially huge zone file can also introduce latency, and we don’t want our newly registered user to experience site no found, right?

I asked the same question on stackoverflow.com, but so far there’re no one answer that satisfies my needs.  Therefore, I thought of making this blog post and cry for help. :)

If you have any suggestion and insight, please fill me a comment, or answer my question at stackoverflow.com.  Thank you!

MVP of Head First OOA&D

To be honest, the Most Valuable Page (MVP) of all 500+ pages of this book is:



This book is very easy to read, but I expected something more advanced. Any other recommendation that can put me on track to become an OO Guru? :)

update: if I'm violating any copyright law, please let me know and I will remove the image immediately.

"Why is ColdFusion so unpopular?"

OK, I'm not on the side of "CF is DEAD", because we know it is not with CF9 coming. However, I'm very interested to see how people in the industry thinks about ColdFusion in general. Therefore, I posted the question "Why is ColdFusion so unpopular?" to stackover.com

Someone tried to change the title to "Why is ColdFusion not as popular as ASP, ASP.NET or PHP?", but I revert back to "Why is ColdFusion so unpopular?" for a broader discussion, rather than just language & feature comparison.

However, there were only 10 Answers because someone thought it is "subjective and argumentative" and closed the thread.

Want to know how other thinks about CF outside of the CF community? Read here.