Readers of this blog know I've been a big fan of the Railo open source CFML server engine. Open BlueDragon also continues to improve and has good support from the community. Now we have the new ColdFusion 9 release from Adobe as well to be excited about! I particularly love the new ORM/Hibernate features. It will be sometime before many of these new features make their way into CFWebstore (since the product will continue to support older CF versions for sometime) but there's one new feature of CF9 you can take advantage of now...speed! One thing that has impressed me so much with Railo was how much faster it ran sites versus CF8 and OBD. CF9 has definitely closed the gap in areas, particularly with object creation. We are seeing some very basic speed comparison tests posted to various ColdFusion blogs which you may find interesting, if you are look to migrate to one of these servers.

Unoffical Speed Test

CFC Creation Time

Object Creation Test

On another note, did you know there is a host offering Railo hosting? Check it out!

Alurium.com

Vivio Technologies also offer both Railo and Open BlueDragon as options on their Linux VPS plans. If you are up for running your own server, this is one of the cheapest options and gives you great performance that blows shared hosting out of the water!

Vivio Technologies

We're continuing to see malware injection attacks against ColdFusion sites. The latest attack used the public upload in the popular Galleon software. Read the details here:

How Galleon Was Hacked

It appears to be the same user(s) as the ones that have attacked CFWebstore and FCKEditor installations, so they clearly are continuing to shift tactics in order to infect ColdFusion sites in new ways, and also change the file names they use to upload to sites, so be sure to check for *any* sites that have upload features that the hackers could make use of.

Those of you on the CFWebstore Yahoogroup probably know what a fan of Railo I am. This CFML server has really impressed me and we are running several clients on it with great success. Now with it being open source, that makes it even more attractive for stores looking to keep their costs low (and these days, that's most of us!) Combine the free Community version of Railo with a low-cost VPS server from someplace like KickAssVPS and you have a site that will blow away the performance you get on typical CF shared hosting, and at basically the same price! Get Franz of Railo will be presenting at the Online ColdFusion Meetup on Thursday, Jan. 29, drop by and see what Railo has to offer you.