I recently made a switch in my hosting CFML server. All my sites on Viviotech (including this blog) are now running off of the Railo v3.1.1 CFML server. Railo is one of the two main open-source alternatives to Adobe's ColdFusion, and by all accounts that I can find, the far more stable and advanced one.
The move is primarily because of budgetary concerns, and there have been some tradeoffs involved. Railo v3.1 does not contain all the capabilities that ColdFusion 8 does. What it is missing though are not tags and functions I find myself using a lot, if ever.In fact, when I tested all my sites on Railo to see how they'd work, the only tag I found missing was the CFTEXTAREA tag. Why that one is not part of the current set I don't really understand, but I have faith that they'll add it in someday, and that's really more of an inconvienence than anything else.
That being said, the one aspect Railo is missing is an answer to the CFREPORT tag, and that alone is why I could never recommend it to my day job as an option (even with PHP looming and the high-licensing costs of CF as one of the main arguments the PHP people seem to have as reason to force a CF to PHP switch. We have one major site that uses CFREPORT, and reports created through the CF Report Builder program, heavily. In talking with some of the Railo folks, I have learned that they don't have it high on their list of missing features to incorporate, not many people use it, it seems.
I'm excited about the propects of open-source CFML, it will open a lot of doors potentially for CF coders to push their favorite web development language to new clients if the large costs of CF licenses are no longer an issue. And the Railo team has some heavy hitters in the CF community supporting it, which bodes well for its future in keeping up with what Adobe is offering. Even if the end result is nothing more than forcing Adobe to lower its prices in the wake of competition, that's a win in itself.
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