I setup an Aptana Cloud site, specifying a Java server. The Java servers are configured with Tomcat 6.x. All I had to do was to download and deploy the a WAR file from the Railo downloads page (the file you want is at the bottom of the page under Railo Custom: railo-3.0.2.001.war (30 MB) ). The process for deployment was all handled via the Studio IDE interface. There's a good screen cast on the Aptana Blog about deploying a WAR file to the Cloud.

Once I downloaded the file, copied it into my web root, and renamed it to railo.war (for easier access in SSH, etc.). After renaming, I opted to deploy my project to the Cloud. Once deployed, I loaded up my URL, http://staging-imageaid.aptanacloud.com/, in Safari and immediately saw the default Railo page. This page contains a quick link to the Railo Administrators. I was able to load the administrators and setup my security passwords for the Server and Application administrators respectively.

The only 'issue' I ran into was setting up the SFTP connection. Because my project is not technically a Java project (it's a ColdFusion site), there's nothing (WAR files) to deploy. I need to upload application files via an SFTP connection (Aptana Cloud provides SFTP connections by default). Setting up the connection was not a problem (all within the IDE).   The gotcha (for me, anyway), was related to file and folder permissions.

When Tomcat extracted the necessary directory (ROOT) and files for Railo, it did so with restrictive permissions. Changing the permissions wasn't hard (it just took me a few minutes to realize that was why I couldn't upload...duh :). I SSH'd into the server and changed the permissions for both the ROOT folder and its child, index.cfm file, which was also set with more restrictive permissions.

Once I did that, I setup an SFTP connection to my site's web root folder (bit of a convoluted trip through the disk hierarchy) and uploaded all my site files.

I decided to upload an application skeleton for ColdBox. It loaded pretty quickly and everything seems to be in working order. All in all, it was pretty painless. I think setting the file/folder permissions took more time than getting Railo running :)!

The only drawback I see thus far is RAM usage. Within minutes of setting up Railo and getting it and the ColdBox framework running pushed my RAM usage to 87-89%. I setup the Cloud account with the minimum of RAM (256 MB) but if Railo pushes the 90% RAM barrier, I would imagine a real application would need the next step up (512 MB) but that adds a lot of extra cash ($20/month versus approximately $72/month). I suppose that higher cost is not out of line with other CF hosting environments (VPS plans, etc.) and could be a viable option for a client's site. For me, it's nice to know that I can not only run ColdFusion on the Cloud but also that it was easy to install and get started.

Next up, I thought I'd install a blog application or two (Mango Blog and BlogCFC) and see how they run. After that, I'll try a couple of small Flex applications to see if/how remoting works. That and I'll be tracking the resource usage.

Comments

jackob
Hi all, today I find another great post about Coldfusion at this blog.

Thank You
ColdFusion CMS
Craig Kaminsky
@steven: thanks, again, for the follow-up posts on the Aptana Forum

@luis: thank you, as well, and I will check into this (posted in the Aptana forum about tweaking the config files and what that entails). Right now, I'm working through a rewrite issue where Tomcat intercepts ColdBox's SES-friendly URLs and does not let Railo parse them:
http://www.imageaid.net/ vs. http://www.imageaid.net/index.cfm/general/index

The same results happen on the test install of the Mango Blog (any URLs not ending in a CFM file result in a 404 error)
Luis Majano
The Ram usage might be because of the way you are assigning memory to your instance via the tomcat configuration. I don't recommend anything below 256mb for instances. But you might want to look into the tomcat's configuration for setting the JVM parameters.
Steven Parkes
Thanks for the nice words, Craig. There are some issues with changing the permissions on the exploded app directory. Rather than clutter up your blog posting, I'm going to follow up on the Aptana Forums article: http://forums.aptana.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=8603