Book Image

Railo 3 Beginner's Guide

By : Mark Drew , Gert Franz, Paul Klinkenberg, Jordan Michaels
Book Image

Railo 3 Beginner's Guide

By: Mark Drew , Gert Franz, Paul Klinkenberg, Jordan Michaels

Overview of this book

<p>Railo Server is one of the quickest ways to start developing complex web applications online. Widely considered as the fastest CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) engine, Railo allows you to create dynamic web pages that can change depending on user input, database lookups, or even the time of day.</p> <p>Railo 3 Beginner's Guide will show you how to get up and running with Railo, as well as developing your web applications with the greatest of ease. You will learn how to install Railo and the basics of CFML to allow you to gradually build up your knowledge, and your dynamic web applications, as the book progresses.</p> <p>Using Packt’s Beginner's Guide approach, this book will guide you, with step-by-step instructions, through installing the Railo Server on various environments. You will learn how to use caches, resources, Event Gateways and special scripting functions that will allow you to create webpages with limitless functionality. You will even explore methods of extending Railo by adding your own tags to the server and building custom extensions. Railo 3 Beginner's Guide is a must for anyone getting to grips with Railo Server.</p>

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Railo 3 Beginner's Guide
Mark Drew | Gert Franz | Paul Klinkenberg | Jordan Michaels
Dec, 2011 | 364 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Railo 3
Railo 3
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introducing Railo Server
Introducing Railo Server
Why use Railo Server?
What does Railo Server do?
A better look at Railo Server
What else can you do with Railo Server?
Summary
2
Installing Railo Server
Installing Railo Server
Getting up and running with Railo Express
Time for action - downloading Railo
Customizing Railo Express
Time for action - setting the administrator's password
Running the Railo Server Tomcat installer
Time for action - installing on Windows
Adding CFML-enabled sites to IIS7
Time for action - adding a site to IIS7
Getting up and running with the Railo WAR and Jetty
Time for action - downloading and installing Jetty
Time for action - booting up Jetty
Time for action - downloading and deploying the Railo WAR
Summary
3
CFML Language
CFML Language
Basics of the CMFL language
Time for action - Hello World!
CFML tags
Time for action - single tag example
CFML functions
Time for action - using built-in functions
Time for action - using user-defined functions
CFML variables
Time for action - using structures
Time for action - creating an array
CFML scopes
Time for action - adding a variable to the SERVER scope
Time for action - creating the APPLICATION scope
Time for action - creating a SESSION scope in your Application
Time for action - using the REQUEST Scope
Handling web data
Time for action - getting variables from the URL
Time for action - getting FORM variables
Database access
Time for action - installing MySQL and setting up our database
Time for action - configuring data sources in Railo Server
Time for action - running queries against our database
Time for action - calling stored procedures
Time for action - creating the Employee component
Summary
4
Railo Server Administration
Railo Server Administration
Server and Web context
Time for action - setting up an example context
Time for action - setting your password
How contexts relate to each other
Time for action - setting the time zone
The Railo Web Administrator
Time for action - investigating the Web Administrator
Time for action - comparing template caching settings
Time for action - restricting the scoping of variables
Time for action - merging the URL and FORM scopes
Time for action - creating a search collection
Time for action - creating mappings in our application
Time for action - using magic functions
Time for action - setting the debug template
Summary
5
Developing Applications with Railo Server
Developing Applications with Railo Server
Railo applications
Time for action - building the simplest application
Time for action - defining the application
Application events
Object relational mapping with Railo Server
Time for action - upgrading Railo Server
Creating our database persistence store
Time for action - creating a database
Time for action - creating our railoblog datasource
Using persistent components
Time for action - creating the blog
Time for action - listing our blog posts
Time for action - adding comments
Caching in Railo Server
Time for action - creating a cache connection
Time for action - using the Cache object
Time for action - getting well versed with more caching functions
Time for action - caching a page with cfcache
Time for action - caching content within a template
Time for action - caching a query using cachedwithin
Time for action - assigning an EHCache Lite connection to resources
Summary
6
Advanced CFML Functionality
Advanced CFML Functionality
Scripting within Railo Server
The <cfscript> tag
Time for action - looping through a list
Time for action - looping an array
Time for action - looping through a structure
Time for action - looping over queries
Time for action - creating the component
Time for action - getting the contents of another site
Time for action - using the <cfloop> tag in CFScript
Time for action - get a user by his/her ID
Time for action - using the Query component
Time for action - getting the content of a website via the HTTP component
Summary
7
Multimedia and AJAX
Multimedia and AJAX
Video
Time for action - displaying a video player
Time for action - installing the Video Extension
Time for action - creating clips for our video player
Time for action - creating poster frames and clips
Time for action - adding a playlist to <cfvideoplayer>
AJAX functionality within the Railo server
Time for action - setting up the application and services
Time for action - binding the input to the component
Time for action - displaying the tasks
Time for action - deleting a task
Summary
8
Resources and Mappings
Resources and Mappings
Railo resources
Accessing files locally
Time for action - writing and reading files
Looping files
Time for action - looping through the contents of a file
Mappings
Time for action - creating a mapping for the log file
Accessing code from mappings
Time for action - creating our components
Railo archives
Time for action - creating a Railo archive
Mappings and their settings
Time for action - changing the settings of a mapping
Accessing your files from ZIP and TAR files
Time for action - accessing files from a ZIP file
Using RAM as a quick location to store files
Time for action - compiling plain text to CFML
Using Amazon's Simple Storage Service to use files in the Cloud
Time for action - using Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3)
Summary
9
Extending Railo Server
Extending Railo Server
Why create your own CFML tags and functions?
Time for action - creating our own CFML tag
Time for action - creating our own CFML function
Installing extensions
Time for action - installing an extension for the web context
Time for action - installing the Galleon forums web application
Time for action - creating our own Railo application extension
Time for action - creating our own extension provider
The Railo Extension Store
Summary
10
Creating a Video-sharing Application
Creating a Video-sharing Application
VideoShare: Getting to know our application
Goals of the application
Creating our application
Time for action - creating our basic application
Laying it all out
Time for action - creating the layout custom tag
Registering users
Time for action - creating our user model object
User login and logout
Time for action - log in or log out of the application
Uploading videos
Time for action - uploading a video
Adding security
Time for action - adding the secure tag
Assigning videos to users
Time for action - storing our video to the database
Converting and playing videos
Time for action - converting the uploaded video
Creating thumbnails for our videos
Time for action - creating images from a video
Adding comments to our video page
Time for action - adding comments to our videos
Creating the home page
Time for action - getting the latest videos
Summary

AJAX functionality within the Railo server

As we have just seen, using and manipulating a video is pretty easy with Railo Server. But that is not all. Railo Server also allows you to add AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) functionality to your web applications with ease.

AJAX allows you to build dynamic frontends that don't need to refresh the page to show results from the server. There are many JavaScript libraries out there that make communicating with the server easy, but as we shall see, Railo Server makes it even easier.

For this section, we are going to build a simple application to store our tasks. For simplicity, we are just going to store our tasks in the session scope, but, if you want, you can save them to the database using the ORM capabilities.

Here's what we are going to build from scratch. It's basically a form that you can enter a task. The entered tasks are listed as shown in the previous screenshot, and you can delete a task by just clicking on the checkbox associated...

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