As programming concepts go this has to be one of the coolest. I received the current CF Developer’s Journal and read the 3rd Part of their CFEverywhere article and decided to try it out.

The basic concept is to program an application in Coldfusion that can be run on a person’s computer or from a CD with no/minimal installation. The ability to Run a Coldfusion program without a server is a fantastic idea, but does it work?

I will have to say after playing with it for a few hours last night and a few hours today it does indeed work!

The instructions found in part one and two of Phil Cruz’s article worked like a charm on Windows XP. I got Jetty, Derby, and Bluedragon working along with the sample application. Once I was satisfied everything worked I decided to copy the files to my Powerbook to see if it was truely cross-platform…..

Unfortunately OS X had to be picky. Jetty and Bluedragon worked fine but Derby died everytime I tried to add a table or data to the DB. I tried everything I could think of, but the example seemed to have left out one important thing .

In the startdb.sh file it needs to have this as the last line to correct the errors:

java -Dderby.storage.fileSyncTransactionLog=true org.apache.derby.drda.NetworkServerControl start

It might be fixed in the new version of OS X but I have yet to upgrade.

I have tested 2 very small fusebox 4.0 and 4.1 apps so far and with some minor SQL changes (they are mySQL) they seem to run fast and without error. I have not tried the 3rd Part of the article of burning it to a CD and writing a Java program to start it, but I will try that next and pass along how it goes.

All in all this is a great idea and a wonderfull set of articles.