Railo

» see getrailo.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The fork that killed Railo came from the same hands that wrote it. On 29 January 2015 Railo's original developer announced a different project, built from Railo's own code, and said there would be no further work on Railo. That is the entire death notice. No statement ever came from the company. The remaining developers confirmed they were going across as well, and the community worked out the rest for itself.

The thing being abandoned had started as a student project in 2002. Michael Offner and Gert Franz set out to compile CFML, the tag language behind Adobe's ColdFusion, into PHP, on the reasoning that PHP was everywhere. The performance was bad enough that they moved the whole idea onto the Java virtual machine instead, and that version turned into a product. Alpha 1 shipped on 10 April 2004 and 1.0 followed in April 2006. Hardly anyone outside the CFML world noticed until June 2008, when Railo Technologies used the second-day keynote at Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh to announce a partnership with JBoss and a switch to open source. ColdFusion cost money per server. Railo was free and faster, running the same language.

I have never written a line of CFML and the first time I read the name Railo was while researching this page. The language was already a legacy choice by the time I was building anything, and its engines were an argument happening in a room I never walked into. What is on this page is a reconstruction from the paper trail, and in this case the paper trail is unusually complete.

~ the case file ~

~ named after a dog ~

Railo is a dog. The name comes from Rhylo, an alien dog in Star Trek: Enterprise, spelled the way a German speaker would write the sound, which is why nobody could agree whether to say rhy-lo or rai-lo. Major releases were codenamed after loyal dogs from history. The software under all this ran at Apple and at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, among others.

~ the company that outlived the code ~

In May 2012, at the cf.Objective conference, Railo Technologies announced The Railo Company Ltd, a private limited company pooling the Swiss firm with five other businesses working in CFML. Companies House has it as number 08055066, incorporated on 2 May 2012, registered on the third floor of 15 Poland Street in London. The last accounts filed were made up to 31 May 2014 and the last annual return to 2 May 2015. The company was dissolved on 19 July 2016.

The code stopped before the paperwork did. Version 4.2.2.005 shipped on 18 December 2014 and the getrailo/railo repository on GitHub shows its final push at 08:29 UTC that same morning. Six weeks later the fork was announced. The repository is still sitting there, never formally archived, with a description in the present tense: Railo is an Open Source CFML Server.

~ the casino on the old address ~

getrailo.org resolves today and returns 146 KB of "Top 10 Best Bitcoin Slots Sites (October 2026)". The identical page sits on wikifonia.org, a dead music archive with nothing whatsoever to do with CFML, which means one parking operator is holding both expired domains and serving them the same template. Lucee carried the users forward and is run by a Swiss non-profit founded for the job, the Lucee Association Switzerland.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »