ramon barahona | blog

Friday and Saturday night without clubbing = bored Sunday morning, what can I do? Lets writte a little bit in my forgotten blog, yes I haven’t post anything in a while, you know very busy days during the week and crazy weekends.

Let’s run Railo, talk about how to install a local development environment for your ColdFusion applications on windows 7 O.S. Also if you have a personal project and you cannot afford an Adobe ColdFusion license, you perfectly can deploy your application using Railo.

Railo - or to be precise Rhylo - is the name of an alien dog in Star Trek Enterprise. It is a Chinese Crested Dog, so it leaves a lot of space for ad tattoos... Rhylo (if you say it in English, it is written Railo in German) appears in episode 25 of Star Trek Enterprise and if you want to read more about him, check out his homepage. So there are different ways to pronounce it. In fact we do not care how one pronounces it. As long as we all know what we are talking about it''s just fine.

Railo Server brings the best of both worlds, a simple markup language, CFML, and blazing fast performance. This great combination means you can both deliver the application in record time and that your application can deliver too! 

1.  First thing the we have to do is download Railo, I recommend to get the Railo Custom version, The war files and the Railo JAR''s can be used for a complete individual installation without any web server included.
2. As a web server, we are going to use Tomcat, make sure to download the apache-tomcat-[version]-windows-x86.zip 32-bit Windows specific distribution that includes the Windows service wrapper and the compiled APR/native library for use with 32-bit JVMs on both 32 and 64 bit Windows platforms.
3. Download JDK (Java Development Kit).
4. Once we have all the software that we need ready, installation is  very simple, we need first to install the JDK.
5. Create a folder in your drive c:\servers\tomcat-dev, copy the tomcat zip content in this folder and make sure to delete everything under c:/servers/tomcat-dev/webapps/
6. Copy railo.war to c:/servers/tomcat-dev/webapps/ en rename ir to ROOT.war
7. set envinroment variables: JAVA_HOME c:\Program Files\Java\sdk  and  CATALINA_HOME c:\servers\tomcat-dev\bin
8. Re-start windows.
9. Open cmd prompt and run c:\servers\tomcat-dev\bin\catalina.bat run.
10. Now in your browser hit http://localhost:8080 and you will see the Railo admin login screen.

Now, you can start developing CFML application without ColdFusion installed, this also work for production environment withApache in front, you can have as many Railo distribution as you want in your computer, your application files will live under:

C:\servers\tomcat-dev\webapps\ROOT

 Remember that Railo and Jrun are same, both of them are Java applications.