Railo Express - Can starting CFML development be any easier?

I was chatting to a friend ( Ryan ) the other day who has some experience with ColdFusion and was looking to get back into it but didn't want to mess up an already established local development environment. He asked for the easiest way to set up a cfml engine. The answer Railo express!

Railo express is available for Windows, OSX and Linux. It's very easy to install, infact you don't even need to install it simple extract and run. Here is a step by step guide ( Under Ubuntu ):

Download the express tar.gz and extract to a location. I choose the desktop under Railo.







Open a terminal and CD to the location and run dos2unix on the start and stop scripts. For some reason the must have been gziped with extra ^m as the end of the line, dos2unix will fix this.






From here you can launch Railo by running ./start.
You can now confirm it's running by launching http://127.0.0.1:8888 in your browser and you will see the following:

This is by default in the Railo express webroot ( ..Railo/webroot ) in index.cfm. I usually just rename the file to admin.cfm so I don't have to remember the path to the admin pages.

To confirm it will execute new code create a new index.cfm:

<br /><cfset somestring = "world"><br /><cfoutput>Hello #someString#!</cfoutput><br />

And reload http://127.0.0.1:8888
Also browsing to http://127.0.0.01:8888/flex2gateway will display a blank white page which lets you know flash remoting is up and running.

Not including download time I guess less then 2 minutes to have railo express running locally and the second time you don't need to run dos2unix so all that's needed is to either double click start or run it via a terminal.

Just a note that Open Blue dragon also has a ready to run version and ColdFusion by Adobe also comes with its own web server and its also easy and quick to setup.