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 Are we any closer to CF support in DNP? I am in the process preparing to roll out production servers using DNP for ColdFusion hosting. The final step before roll out is to automate the process of creating sandboxes and datsources. Before we write this ourselves it seemed worthwhile to find out what the ETA for these features are in DNP.

 Hi,

 Does anyone know whether ColdFusion will be available on DNP?

If you are reading this thread then you know as much as we do :)

My suggestions is that you post what your needs are in a CF management tool in DNP, and which CFML engines you would like it to support and how many customers you would be hosting which make use of the features. The more attention and information for this post the more likely they will be to provide the functionality in future versions

TJ

It already is, the required connectors are created, which is all that is required to support Coldfusion. It however only works on IIS6 at the moment.

any cfadmin stuff you will need to do manually, but if using Bluedragon or railo then you don't have to worry about that as each site has its own admin.

 Out of curioisty Russ, how are you guys dealing with the CF Admin management? Do you do this manually, or have you written hooks into DNP?

I haven't yet migrated to DNP, but we have to do everything manually with HELM anyway, so no difference. I will probably throw together a simple web interface for users to setup mappings, sandboxes, etc. It is just a case of looking up what server their domain is on and conecting with that server.

Hello,

I'm wondering what exatly is needed to host ColdFusion applications? Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise 8 (Standard will not work for more than one website?)?

Thanks

 ColdFusion 8Standard or Enterprise will work for multiple sites. Please see the feature matrix at http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/editions/ to determine if you require Enterprise (Chances are you wont for shared hosting)

Enterprise is definitely needed for shared hosting. standard edition is really not suiable for shared hosting unless you a) do not care about secuirty or b)are happy to provide a crippled version of Cf that isn't much good to most people.

 Ahhh yes, I forgot thatsandboxing is limited to the Enterprise edition.

 Aside from the sandboxing, there is very little else a person would require out of Enterprise for shared hosting.

Also, Railo is an alternative to ColdFusion. it's open source and free, and is capable of shared hosting. There are some features in Railo which actually make it much nicer for shared hosting than ColdFusion does.

Railo looks promising and since I'm a still small hosting provider this could be good alternative for me. Do you have some experience with Railo? Installation looks quite easy:

http://www.hockeypfef.net/index.cfm/2009/1/31/Installing-Railo-Server-on-IIS7-64bit (maybe this URL could be used as a sample for supporting Railo in DNP? - this is just a untestes suggestion).

 I am just this past week testing Railo. I havent been able to delve too far into compatibility between the two engines. However, Railo is wicked fast compared to ColdFusion. Also, the connection between BlazeDS and Railo, for integration of CFML and Flex apps, is very limited at this time and still not production ready.I also noticed some others posting that RegEx differs between engines since they use different RegEx classes.

 In short, be prepared for some compatibility issues and potential for bugs to arise. The upside is the cost savings on licensing, which you can pass on to your customers.

From what I understand people have had great success with the product. I installed mine on CentOS with Apache and Tomcat and overall the installation was relatively easy given i have limited experience with Railo, Linux and Apache. I haven't attempted a Windows integration but I can't imagine it would be difficult.

I would recommend a thorough review of the product before rolling out to production, including tests with existing code.

TJ

There certainly are other features in enterprise that affect shared hosting, you should check the comparison feature list for full details as there are further limitation in std edition.

Railo is great and certainly a viable alternative to ColdFusion for most people as long as they are not using features that only exist in ColdFusion and NOT RAILO or are building a new site and can start with railo. for existing sites however the time and cost to rewrite for compatibility will surely still cause a lot of people to stay with Coldfusion, so I think you will need to support both for the forseeable future to give people the opportunity to migrate. Railo is certainly better geared for shared hosting though.

There are a few things involved with threading, such as PDF generation and the cfthread tag, that certainly gain from the Enterprise version. However, we never had any performance issues or complaints about "missing features" from clients over the 6 year period we used standard. I do recall those servers having an average of 150 sites per server.

There's nothing, aside from Sandbox Security (if your environemt requires it, and most do), that prevent someone from using Standard for shared hosting. It does boil down to what functionality you require, who your clients are, application architecture, etc. Likelihood is that you will need Enterprise for Sandbox security and also benefit from the performance enhancements in the Ent version.

Russ' points on Railo are spot on.