During the recent Adobe User Group Tour – I had to whip up a little app to randomly pick some winners from our RSVP list.
Easy enough but when I went to code it on my laptop I realized I had never installed ColdFusion on it. Oops. I was a bit pressed for time and really didn’t want to mess with getting IIS/Apache running and the long ColdFusion download and install.
I vaguely remembered something about an “Express” version of Railo and a quick visit to getrailo.org and I was downloading a reasonably sized 60mb zip file.
Railo Express is a live version which means that it does not need to be installed. Just extract the zip file it onto your computer and without further installation you can start. This is especially interesting if you e.g. would like to get to know Railo and want to test your applications under Railo or simply use it as development background.
Unzip. I clicked start.bat, Railo spooled up and 30 seconds later I had a running CFML server sitting at localhost:8888! Wow!
So now I’ve got a copy of Railo Express stashed on my USB drive I carry around. Super convenient to have a CFML server available with no installation required and no services running hogging up resources.
Yeah, that’s great
i have also always a railo-express server on my usbstick
I use this on difference clientpc start.bat and cf-rocks –> railo rocks!
Perfect! Now what are the chances of Microsoft releasing SQL Server Express that can also run live from a USB stick without any installation? [FX: tumbleweeds]
Hey, less of the “dirty”!
Why dirty?
Cheers.
30 seconds? Wow, you must have a slow machine :)
Railo Express starts in about 3 seconds for me. Even my multi-web Tomcat install (with six Railo web contexts) starts in 6 seconds :)
And I forgot to click the notify me checkbox (not the layout I’m used to!)
LOL. 30 seconds included unzipping, opening the directory and figuring out I needed to click start.bat.
OK, that makes more sense. Yes, 30 seconds from “no CFML” to “fast CFML” :)
Have you been able to get any databases working with Express? I’ve tried and tried… keeping getting datasource doesn’t exist
Honestly I haven’t worked with Express in awhile but there shouldn’t be any differences in database connections between it and the standard Railo. Have you asked on the Railo mailing list?