Railo Express using Jetty and Virtual Hosts

For some reason I decided to give Railo a try tonight. Railo is dubbed as “the fastest CFML OSS engine” available. The little bit that I’ve messed with it so far, I really can’t confirm that. What I can say however is that setting it up is fairly easy, particularly if you choose to download the express package.

One thing that hung me up though, and seems to hang up some others, is the configuration of virtual hosts when using Jetty. The OS X package is only available with Jetty and the documentation does a fine job of explaining how to setup virtual hosts. The only problem is they fail to mention that you actually need to uncomment some of the included config file to make virtual hosts work properly. Some people might see that right away, I glossed over it.

Documentation for setting up virtual hosts is provided by the Railo team at http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/documentation/installation/railo-express/. Note that in the virtual host definition section the documentation shows the option virtual host information already commented out, in the files distributed in Railo Express, they are not uncommented.

You can learn more about doing virtual hosts using Jetty at http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Virtual+hosts.

5 comments

  1. You’re missing the anchor text between your a href in your blog post for the documentation link. 🙂 If you have any further questions about Railo or anything, don’t forget to join the mailing list. It’s very active and full of smart people and also has some jetty users there. We have some users that took the time to write up some extensive wiki articles on Jetty:

    http://wiki.getrailo.org/wiki/Installation:ExpressJetty
    http://wiki.getrailo.org/wiki/Installation:Jetty

  2. Dustin,

    you write that you cannot confirm the performance of Railo. Do you have any examples for us? We definitely would like to keep Railo the fastest CFML engine out threre…

    Gert

  3. I’m not actually a CF dev myself so I couldn’t really comment fairly until I had loaded in a large CMS. I tried a custom built one as well as MURA and frankly, I found it quite slow. However, I probably don’t know what I’m doing as far as getting correct performance out of Railo/Jetty. For example, I found MURA always had a very noticeable lag between page loads. It also generated a tremendous amount of CPU load for each page load, we’re talking more than 120% CPU.

    My test environment is a 2010 13″ MacBook Pro running 10.6.4.

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