Plesk and ColdFusion 8

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Permalink Reply by Peter Boughton on 27 April 2008 at 12:25pm

ColdFusion can run as a servlet on a J2EE engine (Caucho Resin, Apache Tomcat, etc), so you would need to investigate linking those in. If you're on Apache then look up mod_jk or mod_resin.


There are plenty of things which make the price worthwhile - though for a hosting company it's perhaps harder to justify - since you won't be using them directly... I guess pointing out that it allows dynamic websites to be built quicker and easier, and that you can market that to potential customers.

If the price is a significant issue, there are two other engines worth considering:
- Railo ( www.railo.ch/en ) is my favourite, has low-cost professional/enterprise editions.
- BlueDragon ( www.newatlanta.com/bluedragon ) is another popular one, not currently as cheap as Railo, but they are in the process of setting up one of their versions as Open Source.

(Note: all three engines have the same core features, but they all have their own unique benefits too.)

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Permalink Reply by Dan on 28 April 2008 at 4:02am

So the railo at $2,500 will do everything CF8 Enterprise will at $7,500?

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Permalink Reply by Peter Boughton on 28 April 2008 at 9:10am

Mostly, yes.

There are differences between the two - and price aside, which one is best will depend on the types of features you want.

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Permalink Reply by Dan on 28 April 2008 at 12:02pm

If we can use our current Plesk system to manage accounts, then all i need is something to manage db's and cfml rendering. I guess. Are there deeper divisions of features that break core functions down or what not?

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Permalink Reply by Peter Boughton on 28 April 2008 at 2:19pm

Not quite certain of your question, and I'm not sure about how CF8 handles things (I know it's improved over CFMX7 but not sure of the details), but I'll attempt to answer for Railo.
(I've been working on getting Railo hosting working with cPanel/WHM, a similar product to Plesk.)

To connect up Railo you need to change the server.xml file in your J2EE engine, to tell it to serve .cfm and .cfc files through the Railo servlet for each user's webroot.

(A quick searching about Plesk suggests that it has J2EE and maybe even ColdFusion support built-in, so it this might be really easy to do with Plesk - in cPanel I need to do it manually at the moment.)


Railo gives you a global server administrator (for you), plus local web-context administrators (for your users), where a web-context is linked to an individual account's webroot. (eg: /home/{user}/public_html or similar)
Each local web context allows users to setup database connections (aka datasources) and other similar settings.

In the global server admin, you can limit certain features for each web-context (eg: can they do java stuff, can they access files outside of webroot, how many datasources, and so on)


Not sure if this is answering your actual question or not? Hopefully it's helpful information either way.

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Permalink Reply by Dan on 28 April 2008 at 7:29pm

Thats a big part of the answer. Even answered questions i had, but hadn't asked.

I think my question was more of what CF8 has that Railo doesn't... and visa versa.

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Permalink Reply by Peter Boughton on 28 April 2008 at 9:50pm

Ok, well I've thrown a spreadsheet together which begins to show some differences.

It is far from complete (and probably biased towards Railo), but here it is:
http://hybridchill.com/misc/cfml_engine_comparison.html

What I'm going to do now is convert it into a wiki-style thing so anyone can edit it, and hopefully the eventual end result will be a definitive source of what the engine differences are. :)

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Permalink Reply by Dan on 28 April 2008 at 11:39pm

Sounds like a plan. This may lead to a nifty cool tool. Lol. Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Peter Boughton on 2 June 2008 at 7:40pm

Quick update:
A month later and I've finally got the wiki online.

Available here:
http://www.cfml-engines.info

Permalink Reply by Dan on 2 June 2008 at 7:56pm

Great! Awesome Job.

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