cf.Objective(ANZ) is only a Month Away!

Wow, time flies!

Seems like only yesterday I was doing the closing remarks on the last cf.Objective(ANZ), and now it's already around the corner.

This year is going to be great once again, with lots of top notch speakers and a program that is going to be really interesting as well!

The sessions that I'm personally looking forward to are:

Functional Programming with Clojure & CFML - the best of both worlds?
I'm personally getting more and more into functional programming (or even just writing my OO code with more of a functional style). It's definitely something that is picking up steam all over the place, so I'm keen to see what Kai has to say.

Railo CLI
I'm doing a lot of (J)Ruby work these days, and I'm pretty much living in the console with the great tooling it has in this department. I'm really keen to see what advancements that Railo has made in this area, and see if there are opportunities there for cross pollination.

Building the Olympics
This should have some very interesting war stories of a site that is truly web scale.

Using nginx With ColdFusion
I've always been intrigued by nginx as I've seen it used in many places, but never looked into it itself. I know people that swear by it, so I'll be interested to learn more about nginx.

The Ugly Truth about Frameworks
This is just going to be fun :)

What sessions are you guys looking forward to?

Installing Railo with Resin and Apache on Ubuntu Server

This took me the better part of a Saturday to get figured out, so I figured I would share it with you all.

There seem to be a few guides out there for installing Railo on RedHat based Linux distro's, but nothing for Debian based ones, so it was a bit of hunting around and trying things out to get this working.

I'm doing this all from my notes, which may not be perfect, so if I miss anything out, or have a typo, please let me know, and I will amend them.

1. On your ubuntu server, run:
   sudo apt-get install build-essential apache2 sun-java6-jdk apache2-threaded-dev
   This will install all the pieces you need for Apache, Java, and compiling.
   
2. Download Railo Server, the All OS version, without the JRE. (I tend to grab the .tar.gz version)
3. I like to untar the Railo archive in /opt, but it doesn't make a huge amount of difference, so
   cd /opt
sudo tar -xf ~/railo-3.0.2.001-resin-3.1.2-without-jre.tar.gz
   
4. I also like to make a symbolic 'railo' link to the install, just for convenience, and make it so my user owns it.
   sudo ln -s railo-3.0.2.001-resin-3.1.2-without-jre railo
sudo chown -R {your username} railo
   
5. Now we have actually got Resin and Railo installed, lets make sure they work, run:
   /opt/railo/bin/httpd.sh
   
6. Go to: http://{yourLinuxBox}:8600/, and you should see the Railo test page, with a link to the administrator.
   
7. Assuming the admin ran as expected, we get to compile the Apache connector, which is actually far simpler than you would think. Run:
   cd /opt/railo
#we don't need to specify java-home, as apt takes care or it
./configure --with-apxs=/usr/bin/apxs2
make
#have to use sudo, as it installs the caucho apache module for us
sudo make install
   
8. Restart apache
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
9. If you browse to http://{yourLinuxBox}/ you should see the railo test index.cfm
10. If you browser to http://{yourLinuxBox}/caucho-status, you will see the status of the caucho module
11. Browsing to http://railo/railo-context/admin/index.cfm will take you to the Railo admin.
12. Now edit /opt/railo/conf/resin.conf, and set up <host> entries that match your Apache virtual hosts. This allows the Caucho module to know where to send the appropriate .cfm and .cfc requests.
    For example, I like to run each of my CF projects on a seperate port, so my resin.conf <host> entries look like:
    <host id="railo:71" root-directory="/mnt/hgfs/wwwroot/test">
    <web-app id="/" root-directory=""/>
</host>
13. Resin will restart itself whenever it detects the resin.conf file has been changed, so if that hasn't happened, just hit a .cfm page again, it usually wakes it up.
14. That's it... that should get you up and running with Resin and Railo on Ubuntu pretty quickly!

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.  I'm not a Railo guru, but if I can help, I will.