I have been using FarCry for a long time. My team finally has reached a critical mass where we are starting to outline some projects we hope to complete in 2016 that we can contribute back to the Community.
That being said, I wanted to ask the community about the way they talk about deployment with clients and potential clients. There seems to be a religion among clients these days that everything must be “Open Source”. For the less educated of my potential clients, I often find this term confused with “WordPress” or “Drupal”. The problem is, I’m quibbling over semantics. The decision makers that evaluate our proposals are looking at whether they can take our work and move it from our environment running Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise 11, MS-SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012. While FarCryCore may be Open Source, the entire stack that I’m running it on is not.
So, I wanted to reach out to this community that has been lovingly keeping FarCry going and is actively engaged in keeping it up-to-date.
Do any of you deploy on completely Open Source platforms like Railo, MySQL, and Linux? Are there other alternatives? Do any of you use Cloud Services like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services to manage deployment and hosting? What about tools like Docker?
At Daemon we always try to deploy on full open source stacks where it suits the client’s needs.
For open source CFML we support Lucee (previously Railo) and it’s our preferred platform to deploy on. http://lucee.org/
Most of our databases are now on MySQL on Amazon RDS.
As for the OS we have a mix of Ubuntu and some other flavours of Linux, mostly on Amazon EC2.
Beyond that, once you start looking at the Docker space the individual container OS becomes a little less relevant to most apps, you basically want to run in something small that can run the things you need (in our case just the JVM, so good choices are Debian or even busybox / Alpine).
At the end of the day FarCry Core is Lucee compatible and FarCry apps should run on full open source stacks after you do a bit of review on your code base. The things to check would be any Adobe CFML features that aren’t implemented in Lucee (cfexchange, maybe some PDF things, etc) or some MSSQL server specific syntax that needs to be ported to MySQL.
FarCry core development is typically done on Lucee and patched for Adobe ColdFusion, so support for Lucee engine is a first class priority. It’s worth noting that Daemon is a Member of the Lucee Association Switzerland and is currently the Member representative for President (Geoff Bowers).
You may find some hiccups moving from ACF to Lucee but there is nearly always a workaround with a little bit of refactoring. Some applications “just work” with little or no effort at all.
FarCry Core framework translates seamlessly from MSSQL to MySQL and back again. You are only likely to hit areas that need refactoring with custom queries within your project or plugins.
While we have little if anything to do with Microsoft Azure, we deploy almost exclusively into Amazon AWS through OpsWorks as whole servers or via Tutum (https://www.tutum.co/) as Docker containers.
Lucee is fully supported on Docker with Lucee Dockerfiles available:
And we have sample installs for FarCry projects on Docker for folks to play with:
For example the www.daemon.com.au and www.farcrycore.org websites both run on Docker
