Over the past few weeks, some of the guys at Smarticles have been building some CFWheels on Railo applications.

We have had a few points that we have had problems with, and others that have easy solutions.

Positives

Multiplatform without thinking

Getting the Railo environment ready on Mac, PC and Linux is a doddle. It makes multi-disciplinary teams possible, and easy. I set up the environment on my Mac, and sent the code to a PC guy, it just worked.  I forgot to put transition time into the project plan – so it’s luck that there wasn’t any.

Really Quick to develop in

Once the initial day of head-scratching is over, Wheels is really really quick to develop in.

I love the convention over configuration approach. Its liberating to work with.

Form Handlers

For one of our applications we havent got a page design. But we have build lots of pages using the standard form handlers. We know that the html will be sensible, usable and rational. All we have to do is tweak the css into place.

Negatives

Only a couple:

Redirects

I still haven’t got the redirects to work. I don’t need them on the development environment. So its a backburner issue for me; not really a problem. Also some of the solutions look quite easy.

Contexts

The railo site talks about setting up contexts for each app. For the first app, this isn’t really required, and actually slows down the time to get a developer happy in the environment.

Other Thoughts

Documentation on slow connections

Some of the team work on very slow connections. This means that browsing a website for documentation sometimes slows them down.  The API documentation wasn’t available as a download. We have it as a chm if anyone feels the need.

Partials

When we started development; we didn’t know about partials. If you want connect blocks in your code – partials are what you need.