An Architect's View

I said I'd look at Railo on Tomcat next but I figured I'd just sneak in a quick Express for Windows post before that so folks don't think I'm forgetting all those PC users.Download Go to the download page and under "Railo Express", pick the "Windows" zip file: railo-3.0.2.001-railo-express-6.1.0-with-jre-windows.zip This puts a 58MB ZIP file on your system (I saved it to Downloads). Right-click the ZIP file and Extract to... your Desktop (I used WinZip because Windows 7's built-in unzip can't extract things correctly!). Starting Railo In the folder created from the ZIP file, simply double-click the start file (start.bat). Accept the various Windows security alerts. It will start a cmd window and run a command to start Railo. After six or seven seconds, the cmd window will show Started SelectChannelConnector @ 0.0.0.0:8888 to indicate that Railo is running. Do not close that window (because that will stop the server). That's it - Railo is running. Yes, after just six or seven seconds! Testing Browse to http://localhost:8888/. You'll see the Railo test page! A real application Last time we installed ColdBox from the ColdBox website. This time we'll install ColdBox directly from within the Railo Web Administrator! Click on the admin link on that page and choose the Web Administrator. It will ask you to provide a new password and confirm it. Then choose Applications under Extension (experimental) and click Activate the extension manager. Select ColdBox and click install. Change the Path for the install so it ends in just coldbox, not coldbox-2.6.1-1 (component paths cannot have '-' in them so you'll have problems running the samples if you don't do this). Uncheck the Mapping creation (we don't need it with ColdBox directly in the webroot with the coldbox folder name). Click install on that second screen. Click OK on the next screen when it confirms where it has installed the framework. Then browse to http://localhost:8888/coldbox/samples/. It should show the ColdBox Samples Gallery page and you can try out the examples. Congratulations! You've installed Railo on Windows and started it. You've installed ColdBox and tried out some sample applications and it all works! Stopping Railo In the folder created from the ZIP file, simply double-click the stop file (stop.bat). Accept the various Windows security alerts. Then it will open a new cmd window and run a command to stop Railo. Both the original cmd window and this new one should close. Railo is stopped. Next time I really will look at a basic installation of Railo on Tomcat!