In this presentation, Railo's Mark Drew will show you how your applications can live in the cloud, work with the cloud and use the cloud to increase your performance both permanent as well as Just In time computing needs.

It will cover deploying your application to Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Stax as well as using Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3).

If you haven't yet deployed to the cloud, aren't quite sure what the cloud is, or simply want to hear the subtle tones of Mark's voice, then get yourself in this session, which is London only.

For those attending Manchester or Edinburgh, Sean Corfield will be presenting on "Living in the Cloud".

Get your ticket for Scotch now!

As of yet, my lovely wife Leanne and I, have failed to go on a honeymoon (we got married November 8th). In fact, our honeymoon may even end up being CFUnited in August (followed by a week in New York), but to tide us over, we're heading to London next week to see a few friends, etc. London is effectively a second home to me as I'm there on business that often, but Leanne has never seen outside of Heathrow airport when it comes to her experience of London.

Anyway, out trip coincides with the UKCFUG meeting with Railo's Gert Franz, and as Gert was at our wedding, Leanne and myself are going to pop into the UG meeting to say hello, and leave Fuzzy Orange stickers all over Mark Drew's desk (the meetings are held at DesignUK's office, which is of course where Mark works).

Hopefully I'll see a few other London CFers kicking about the meeting too.

Out of curiosity, I decided to dump the client project I'm working on just now into the current Railo 2 Release Candidate.

We're currently developing on CF7.0.2 and using SQL Server 2005 as the database.

So, what was the prognosis?

No code changes were required. It just worked.

It's about 3 times as fast on Railo. No scientific numbers for you. It's just that when I reinit the app, I can usually get up, walk round the office, and when I sit down again, the app is now being served up.

With Railo I only got as far as getting out of my chair.

Pretty damn impressive. Now to see how it goes on CF8.

With Ben Forta's announcement in regards Per Application Mappings, it brought up the topic of "How is it being done across the different CFML engines?" <CFMAPPING> was introduced in BlueDragon 6.2.1, whereas in Scorpio Per Application Mappings will be supported via Application.cfc Reading a blog posting from Vince Bonfanti from a while back, it looks like NA plan to introduce support via Application.cfc as well (at the time BD didn't have Application.cfc). The nice thing about NA's implementation is that older applications which still use Application.cfm/onRequestEnd.cfm will have support for the Per Application Mappings ... And I believe Railo supports Per Application settings as part of it's core architecture. See the following blog post by Gert Franz It's all good stuff, though maybe not exactly compatible across all the engines. So, who's approach is best? What are the pitfalls of each? Why not come along to Scotch on the Rocks, where we have folks from Adobe, New Atlanta and Railo and ask them directly.

Now that I work for myself (well, Fuzzy Orange Ltd) I *should* have more time on my hands to dig into a few more technologies and cool stuff that my old job simply didn't allow time for. It's not quite worked out that way, however as I've been working on stuff for Scotch on the Rocks I've been looking into Flex2, Spry and Railo - in no particular order. And one of the things I've seen from the latest Railo Beta is that a number of new tags have been added to increase it's compatibility with CFMX7. Support for the tags below have now been added, and there's been some new stuff added to the various CFC tags.

• <cftrace>
• <cfproperty>
• <cfstoredproc>
• <cfprocparam>
• <cfprocresult>

If you want to find out that bit more about Railo then head over to their website or come to Scotch on the Rocks where Railo will be presenting.