Help with some research?

I am in the process of moving a large website to lucee from cf8. Not sure if it is because it was written on such an old version of cf or it is just the change to lucee, but there were quite a few problems. Biggest was PDFs. PDF creation is by using a plugin but apparently it doesn’t support multiple lines when trying to fill in a pdf form. If you use PDFs extensively, try that out first. Had to go through each form and break them down into single lines and programmatically figure out where each line goes. Not fun.

There seems to be some reserved words in Lucee that wasn’t in CF8 - hit a few of those.

I may be wrong - but when the email server gets clogged up and a cfmail fails, the file is written to a .tsk file in the web-inf/lucee / remote-client/ open (or closed) directory… but apparently you can’t just copy those to a queue directory like you can in cf. They are lost for good?

I haven’t optimized the server settings yet but right out of the box, everything seems much slower than on cold fusion 8.

On the other hand it is significantly cheaper -so probably worth the extra work.

Actually, they just replaced the last *nix server with a Windows server (not sure why). The Apache web server they don’t have a problem with, but they may not know that Apache is open source. Or Tomcat. :fearful:

What is the difference between Express and the full-blown Lucee?

V/r,

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This is very good feedback from someone who recently went through the process. The only issue I have is with this statement:

I started switching from CF8 to Railo (Lucee’s predecessor) almost a decade ago. Railo was running so much more efficiently than CF8 (both memory and CPU), that I replaced 3 CF8 servers that were used for Load Balancing with a single Railo server which had still room to grow.

Sorry to hear about the issues you’ve been experiencing with the switch. I’d think that a lot of the issues are because CF8 is so old, now.

We don’t work with many CF generated PDFs. The most we do with PDFs is using Solr collections so that gigs and GIGS of PDF files can be index searchable. Something I should have asked @21Solutions about - does Lucee use Solr collections for keyword searching files and/or database tables??? How does it compare to ACF?

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Kind of funny given that Windows is moving more towards Linux nowadays.

It’s just the packaging. The Java code is the same. The Express edition allows you to unzip the archive and run a startup batch/shell script and start running.

You can watch the beginning of the video that I posted recently at Lucee Websockets - Getting Started - YouTube which shows how I unzip Lucee Express and Launch it. You can also get a glimpse of the Admin there.

Unfortunately Lucee’s full text search, while exists, is not that great and hasn’t been updated much in recent years – don’t get me wrong – CF8’s was just as bad IMO. I’ve never tried newer versions of ACF beyond the basic comparisons of compatibility with Railo/Lucee, and did that on a need-to-do basis, so I can’t really tell more on that.

The good news is, that there is a far better solution than SOLR nowadays: ElasticSearch – Elasticsearch: The Official Distributed Search & Analytics Engine | Elastic

It also uses Lucene (not to be confused with Lucee) behind the scenes, just like SOLR, but provides a much easier interface. The best part is that if you use ElasticSearch externally (as opposed to the built-in search), then you have complete control over your search indices, queries, etc. So it’s definitely worth the refactoring IMO, even if you stay with ACF.

At the very least make sure that you give Lucee enough RAM. The default settings may be too low.

That is probably why. I am running lucee with sql express in a VPS with 4 gigs ram (although it does use SSD drives. Memory utilization in the resource monitor is 95%. How much ram should I get?

That’s definitely not a good sign.

It depends on many factors, but IMO 4GB is not enough even for the OS and SQL Express. But the amount of available RAM and the amount that is allocated to Lucee are not the same thing.

You should probably get more RAM in general, and then be sure to allocate more RAM to Lucee.

You can find out how much RAM Lucee is using/has available by mouse-over’ing the Memory Usage section in the Lucee Administrator’s Overview page on the right side.

I’ll check into that, even if we stick with ACF, because although I like SOLR better than Verity, it still isn’t all that great. Thanks!

V/r,

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BTW… whomever moved this thread into the dev category, I respectfully disagree. There is nothing in this thread that is about development or code or anything like that. :slight_smile:

V/r,

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Just a quick update. I added 2 gigs of ram (total of 6 gigs - and now a gig is free), and it is much faster than the coldfusion version. You were right. Thanks

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@WolfShade In regards to your original post, I’d like to point out that many open source projects get their bad reputation from just being a thing that some guy wrote and stuck on github with no support, etc. Lucee is open source which has a lot of benefits, but it is backed by a proper organization called the Lucee Association Switzerland (or LAS). The members of this organization include most of the major players in the CF space like Ortus Solutions (ColdBox), Blue River (Mura), Pixl8 (Preside CMS), Rasia (the original people behind Railo/Lucee), WebApper, etc. The member fees help pay for ongoing development, documentation, and support of the platform and the members themselves offer professional services such as paid bug fixes, paid features, and training for Lucee. This gives us the benefits of an open source project but with the support and constant activity of a commercial offering. Please ensure your higher ups realize this! :slight_smile:

Regarding playing around with Lucee, another way to get a server running quickly with zero install is to look into CommandBox. It is a CLI that will start any version of Lucee (or Adobe CF for that matter). All you need installed is Java. https://commandbox.ortusbooks.com/content/getting_started_guide.html

So in regards to white papers etc about switching to Lucee, I’m not sure if any exist but I can tell you that some very large companies such as NASA and ESRI are already using Lucee with great success. Specific benefits of Lucee include its modular OSGI architecture, extensible via modules, lightweight footprint, and advanced features such as the cache manager and better Cloud deployment via environment variable support and such.

Thank you for the additional pro-points, @bdw429s. I’ll be sure to include those in my presentation. Esp the bit about NASA and ESRI (I work for USG DoD - those might be huge bullet points.)

One thing that I’ve been meaning to ask: PDF/Excel/Word support.

I recently read a thread in Adobe forums in which someone had mentioned that Lucee does not have the full PDF, Excel, or Word support that ACF has. I haven’t, yet, Googled that. What can anyone tell me about the support or reported lack thereof??

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BTW… I’ve been searching via Google for big name companies that use Lucee. Haven’t found one, yet. Does anyone know of a comprehensive list of companies that are using Lucee, either internally or for public-facing pages/apps?

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https://lucee.daemonite.io/t/list-of-sites-running-lucee/1701/10

Thanks, @bdw429s, I see many sites that end in .ch or .de, and I saw the ‘members’ list on lucee.org, most of which I have never heard of.

NASA and ERSI will get attention in my presentation, for sure. But I doubt that the higher-ups here have ever heard of PIXL8, Rasia, Infotrax, or any of the members listed. Or any of the supporting corporations. Which I don’t see NASA or ESRI in either of those lists.

From the link you provided, I saw that in March 2015 there was HTML made and planned to be implemented into the Lucee website, but no link provided to actually see that list. I’ve also been going through all the links on lucee.org and I’m not seeing any lists of companies that use Lucee other than the members and supporters.

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I’ve also been searching via Google for “websites that use Lucee”, “Lucee websites”, “companies that use Lucee”, and other keyword searches that I’m not currently recalling, and I’m not seeing any comprehensive list of websites that are using Lucee (vs ACF).

Does anyone know of such a list, especially one that indicates NASA and ESRI are using Lucee?

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Keep in mind that for security reasons, many companies try to obfuscate the types of server that they use. The more information revealed, the more vulnerable the overall system.

Working for the USG DoD, I understand about security. However, after some more Google-ing, I did manage to find ONE snippet of information regarding NASA using Railo. I just need to find more like this.

V/r,

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