Railo 3 Beginner’s Guide book giveaway

Want to get a head start in Railo and CFML development? Packt Publishing is giving away 3 copies of Railo 3 Beginner’s Guide. I have this book and it's a great resource from installing Railo to developing web applications. The draw will be in 2 weeks and the winner will be notified by email simply fill in your details!

ColdFusion 10 in public Beta

Well ColdFusion 10 has been made into public Beta.  This is great news.  There are quite a few changes and one of the most significant to me ( I hope ) will be the easy path to patch my servers.  I currently look after a large number of server behind a very active load balancer and it's quite costly in terms on time to upgrade each server.  There are multiple other good introductions with ColdFusion 10 but that's my favourite at the moment.

Some others include:

• Unique HTML5 built-in support to deliver richer interfaces without prior knowledge of HTML5
• Improved web services support using revamped engine and built-in support for REST
• Security enhancements to protect applications with new secure profile, improved authentication and encryption.
• Scheduler improvements to manage application-specific tasks, event handling, grouping, and chaining of tasks
• Built-in Tomcat server replacing Adobe JRun leading to performance improvements
• Instant notification and One-click Hotfix installer for updates
• Object Relational Mapping to build database independent applications without writing SQL
• Bi-directional Java integradfgtion to dynamically load libraries and invoke ColdFusion components (CFCs) from Java

And more: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/10.0/Developing/WSf23b27ebc7b554b664dd90601357fb06a77-7ffd.html

And: http://nowshowingcoldfusionzeus.appspot.com/

Download it here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion10/

Also ColdFusion Builder 2.01 is also in Beta so grab that aswell.

Where do you host your ColdFusion sites?

Lots of people ask me where I host my ColdFusion sites or recommendations for quality hosting.  At work we use a large ( but expensive provider ) which is mostly out of individuals budgets.  For my side projects I have switched to Amazon EC2 as my primary VPS solution.  In fact the Windows and Linux micro instances are now free fro a year and you can run mySQL and ColdFusion on one of these servers.  If you really want it to be free run Railo ( it's also got less over head ).  I'd also recommend Rackspace as there cloud offering is really fast and they have great support.  I'm also a fan of a bargain and have quite a few smaller VPS's that I pickup on sale from LowEndBox.com there often worth a try to get your Linux skills updated.  As for shared hosting I don't have any preference but I do have an account at HostingAToZ which is very cheap ( $12.50 a year ) and hosts quite a few of the demos on this blog.  Any one any have suggestions?

We used to have quite a few servers in Co-location but we have stopped that as really who wants to also manage and support hardware.