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My job has/is shifting away from CFML to C# and .NET. I've been boning up with some tutorials and such but it's better for me to write something I actually want to to figure out and learn stuff. I've also been working in Xamarin doing native mobile app development in C# but that's for another post.
Lucee and Railo (>=4.1) both support elvis operators (?:) and using them is quite simple. Using it, we can DRY up some code in CFML often seen to initialize objects with config/options.
I've released a wrapper library to send email with SendGrid that is also packaged as a ColdBox module. Checkout sendgrid-cfml. It's on ForgeBox too! From inside CommandBox, you can do install sendgrid-cfml and install the module and add it as a dependency to your project in the box.json in one go! I still have to write documentation but there are a few examples for working with it.
Recently, I've been putting thought into scalability and redundancy for Railo application servers. Some of the thoughts came out of my previous post on nginx and load balancing from the web server. Session management is often the elephant in the room. Some load balancers offer sticky sessions so that users get assigned to a server and stay there until session expiry. I think the ideal scenario is round-robin where requests can hit any server in the pool so load is spread evenly across the system. If you need to take down a server for maintenance or something crashes, it'd be really nice to not inconvenience your users by losing what they were working on and needing to log back in.
Nano Breither wrote up a really great post on using nginx with Railo and Tomcat. I recommend reading that post first if you're looking for info on Railo and nginx as your webserver. I wrote up a lengthy-ier comment thought I'd toss it up here too as I haven't seen much info on Nginx and applying it to Railo. I've been running nginx having it proxy to Railo for years. To be honest, I've never missed Apache and I certainly don't miss IIS (I've only ever used it with Adobe ColdFusion anyway).