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A Step-By-Step Guide To Install Railo Server 3.1 On Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

When I was ready to install Railo server I hit up google to see how you would go about installing it on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). There wasn't a lot out there. Actually, there was only one good article I could find, but it didn't allow me to do everything. I've decided to post the steps I took to install Railo Server on my Apple G4 running Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. But first, I have to give credit where credit is due. I based this entire article on what I found here at Luis F. Majano's blog. Everything is built upon this post. Thanks Luis!

My Goal

The goal of this install is to get Railo running on my server and to have all web files located in a common folder and accessible from the outside internet. I need to do this, so my clients can check their site as I am developing them. I have not tried installing PHP or Adobe ColdFusion server along side Railo. This is something I may look into down the road.

My Setup

• Here's a quick list of my setup:
• Apple G4 Server running Mac OS X 10.5.8
• Railo 3.1.1 w/Resin for Apache (www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/download/)
• MySQL 5.1.38 (This is not really important for this tutorial, just listing what I'm using)

Pre-requisites

You are going to need to have a text-editor of some sort, I use BBEdit. It allows me to edit hidden/protected files, by providing my Admin password. I'm going to assume that you can figure out how to edit these files if you plan on using something else. You are going to need to use the Terminal.app (don't be scared, I'm by no means a Terminal master). And finally, you are going to need to have XCode installed on your development machine in order to make the install the Railo Apache connector. And lastly, you need to be logged in as an Administrator. I don't think this will work, if you cannot do this.

This may seem obvious to some, but just in case, you also need to have Apache running. To do this, you need to open up System Preferences > Sharing. Make sure that Web Sharing is checked. You can test if Apache is working by pointing your web browser to your server (localhost or 127.0.0.1 if it's on the machine locally) and see if you get the default Apache welcome screen. If it is, your ready to roll. If it's not, then you need to get that working before you can continue.

Transitioning From Adobe ColdFusion To Railo On Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

I've been developing ColdFusion sites for a good 10 years. I remember the Allaire days, eased through the Macromedia days and suffered through the Adobe days. ColdFusion 4.0 was my first taste of the CFML language. I'm not sure if it was it short learning curve or it's ability to allow me to create websites so quickly, but either way I fell for it instantly.

I'll be the first one to tell you that ColdFusion always had room for improvement. My complaints were fairly simple, from wanting server side image manipulation without using a plug-ins, to making it less of a resource hog. The biggest complaint I have nowadays, is the fact that Adobe seems to be focusing ColdFusions attention to Flash and Flex. Two technologies, which I will admit, could care less about.

I'm sure some of you would argue with me, but I think the days of developing Flash sites are numbered. With HTML 5 on the horizon, there's really no need to bother with this buggy, resource hogging, technology. It saddens me that Adobe (or more to the point, Adobe's sales department) is pushing this technology so hard. I wish they would focus more on the core language and features, but alas they don't seem to be going that direction.

Then this week something happened. My ancient Apple G4 development server which was running Adobe ColdFusion 8 crashed. I decided to do a clean install of everything and at the same time upgrade the operating system from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. I really wanted to take advantage of Apple's Time Machine to do my back-ups, which unfortunately is only available for Leopard users. The upgrade was going smoothly up to the point where I installed ColdFusion server. Oops! Apparently ColdFusion doesn't play well with Leopard. IT has something to do with the Apache contector or something. Honestly I just didn't care anymore.