Blue Dragon To The Rescue

As I explained in my last post, I started to run into issues with my Railo installation as it was getting hit too hard by requests. In all fairness, Railo is beta software and I was a bit weary of putting beta software into a production environment anyway.

With all of the hype about Railo nowadays, I had forgotten about Open BlueDragon which has been available for over a year now. The nice thing about BlueDragon is that is was a fork of the commercial version of the product, so it is very robust and mature. Plus it is licensed under the GNU GPL (v3) so there are not many restrictions on its use.

Although the Railo install was a bit more involved as the Caucho connector for Apache needs to be compiled, there are self-contained install packages available for BlueDragon on many platforms. After walking through a quick and simple installation script, I had BD running in no time! And I must say, the speed is really incredible. It is noticeable just how fast the engine processes.

On top of that, I now have access to a number of additional tags that I actually think will be quite useful in my development. You can view some of the additional tags available here, but in particular, I can see the CFJAVASCRIPT and CFSTYLESHEET coming in handy for joining and compressing those files, and it's very nice to have access to Amazon S3 and Simple DB right in the language, since those have become so important to developers. Let's hope the other CF engines add these also so we can utilize them more in publicly released software. I'm finding it a challenge to make some features available and others not, especially since older versions of CF will fail if you use parameters in a tag that are not recognized. (P.S. I have gotten around this by using CFINCLUDE to grab the code for that engine)

I have not had a chance to run Adobe's ColdFusion engine on Linux, so I can't speak for its memory footprint. My server is currently utilizing about 800MB of RAM - about half of which is being used for BlueDragon. Railo was actually clocking in about 200MB higher, so another nice savings there. I have had one crash so far (probably need to limit search bots), but overall the server is running MUCH smoother and feels very production ready. Thanks and kudos to NewAtlanta for moving ColdFusion in the right direction and making such a powerful CF server free and open source.