Setting up Railo in the same way as Multiple Instance Adobe CF

Question

I'm looking to install Railo in the same way we currently do for Adobe CF.

At present we run Adobe CF8 on top of JRUN 4, in a multiple instance setup. On our local sandboxes we use Apache as the web server. We then use Apache Virtual Directories to point to our codebase which exists outside of the CF Context. This gives us ultimate flexibility in that we can be running multiple servers, multiple sites, from anywhere location on our machines. In Production we use IIS 6, but the above still applies.

All the documentation that I've come across to date has not yet been able to emulate this. I've tried combinations of JBoss, Railo WAR, Apache, JkMount, Resin, JRUN, etc.

Things we are trying to avoid: We don't want Tomcat to be involved (duplicating the web server requirement), we don't want to have to configure anything in JBoss per new site (as well as Apache), we need our codebase to be run from any location.

Has anyone successfully managed to emulate this approach for Railo? Could you point me in the right direction, or could a representative from Railo write a blog post for it?

Thanks in advance!

Dave

Answer 1

Here is a blog post on setting up Railo in JRun. Sean would be the guy to ask about this too if you have any more problems.

Answer 2

The ability to install several instances of Railo or CF is not a Railo or CF feature but one of the application server. Railo has the great built in Sandbox security for each defined web context. A web context normally is aligned with a virtual host setting in the app server. Since in Adobe CF there is only one web context something like the sandbox security needs to be applied.

Anyway, different application servers (like Resin) allow you to use regular expressions for virtual hosts definition (this means that the web contexts are created on the fly and implicitly) or single conf files in a certain directory for each web context you want to create. After this has happened the settings for your different applications running in the different web contexts are separated from each other. Security at its best.

You can have your webroots located wherever you like. The only thing that does not work is that you create a virtual directory in Apache or IIS and then your application already runs in there as well. BUT what you can do in Railo is to create a mapping that is called identically and that points to the exact same location. Then you can use it exactly as in CF.

We might even consider to read the virtual directories from the web servers and implicitly create the corresponding mappings. In addition you could create per application mappings in order to solve that problem.

If you have any other questions, just email our Railo google group.

Gert Franz

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Railo Professional Open Source

gert (at) getrailo.com