Connecticut Coldfusion User Group My first CT CFUG.

Last night I attended the Connecticut Coldfusion User Group for the first time in person ( I was there last time via connect ). It was really nice to meet some more fellow CFers. I’m always looking for new ideas and better/different ways of approaching programming issues and open discussion among like minds usually results in a few good/new ideas surfacing.

The focus of the night was Railo 3.0 and the upcoming 3.1 Opensource release. Gert showed us many of the features of Railo including shortcuts’ in cfdump, cfvideoplayer and cfvideoright upto possibly the one that bought about the most discussing using ram as a file storage space. Gert demonstrated saving files ( in his example a .cfm file ) into a “virtual” ram drive. At the time most of asked each other why? then when I though about it I had a perfectly good reason and example. We use a lot and write dynamic images and charts out to disk to be able to use them when generating the pdf. Disk access is slow we all know that so writing temp files to ram is going to be many times faster I can see this being a usefull option to speed up a process such as this.

After the presentation we had brief discussion as why Railo and won’t Railo/Open DB always be playing catchup to CF. I suspect all three will play some catchup with each other but at this stage I think ColdFusion is still by far the leader and convincing a CTO to move from an application server by Adobe to a smaller company would be a bit of a battle. That being said the more CFML the better and it opens doors to new/intermediate developers, students, casual programmers if there are free engines available and when you need the Coldfusion only “bits” well then the cost of actually purchasing Coldfusion is not really that great considering how much development time you have saved.
I’ll keep playing with Railo ( hey my Flex datagrid to excel example runs on it ) but for my day job we will still be sticking to Adobe’s Coldfusion.