I have recently discovered some issues when running Railo on IIS 7 along with ASP.net and/or custom modules. In certain situations you will get a "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error on your CFM pages even though they were working fine previously.

In particular my issue was being caused when using custom modules were installed for password protected folder, such as the WebsitePanel module or Helicon APE, which then broke CFM pages.

The solution is actually really simple, you just need to convert your "jakarta" virtual directory into an application. Obviously this only applies if you are using the Tomcat or similar distro which requires such a virtual directory. If you are using the Helicon Zoo module then you will have no such issue.

I am not absolute sure why this occurs, but my guess would be because the request is first handed off of the connector to be processed by Tomcat, which process in the process being returned to IIS with the wrong identity, and thus fails to execute the module in-process.
By setting the jarkarta vDir to an application it then then runs the connector using the application pool identity instead.

So if you switch to a different application pool or identity or even .net version/mode then you may need to also change the jakarta vDir to be the same.

For the last 9 weeks or so I have been on a diet, it wasn't really a choice, my wife discovered DietChef and make the decision for me (I guess she thinks I am too fat), which is probably a good thing as I doubt I would have done it for myself , but I  have to say that I was actually pleasantly surprised, so I decided to write a review.

DietChef is basically calorie controlled dieting for dummies. If you are too too busy, too lazy, too stupid or just lack the motivation and self discipline to control your calorie intake yourself then DietChef is probably just the ticket for you. You get a monthly supply of calorie controlled ready meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner) delivered to your door which you eat every day instead of your usual meals, which you can supplement with things like rice, pasta and vegetables. 
I have always fallen into the too busy/lazy category, I like cooking, but I really cannot be bothered with calculating how many calories in everything I eat, weighing out exact portions, yada yada, this always seems like too much hassle when I get home from work and just takes the pleasure out of cooking...... 

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My glasses broke last last week leaving me a right predicament as I had no spare pair and I am blind without them. All I could find was an old pair of prescription sun glasses which are far too dark to wear inside and also had a big scuff on each lens (thanks to my kids) making them pretty horrid to wear, but as that is all I had, that is what I have been wearing.
As I am clearly going to be stuck with these until the new year till I can get a new pair I thought I would research if it was possible to remove scratches from lenses.
I found a lot of weird suggestions, one of which was to use a "non abrasive" toothpaste with a soft cotton cloth (do not use kitchen paper or anything rough), which was about the thing I had in the house from all the suggestions, so I thought I would give it a try,

To my great surprise, it worked, and and all the scratches and scuffs have now gone and apart from being too dark and an old prescription they are about 10 times better and actually wearable now.

I suspect this only works on lenses which have an anti reflective, anti scratch coating or an outer tint and where the scratches are very minor as the cleaning chemicals in the toothpaste must take off a very thing layer of the lens coating, thus taking the scratches off with it.
So if your specs fall into this category and are a bit worse for wear, give it a try, you may just give them a second life.

Another of the big annoyances with Railo is that it won't handle SEO friendly URL's out of the box, you need to get into the application servers servlet mappings to add url filters for each of your SEO URL formats.

e.g. each of these would require a separate servlet mappings url-filter.

mysite.com/index.cfm/something
mysite.com/sub1/index.cfm/something
mysite.com/muraCMS/index.cfm/something

If you are on a shared server then this can be a big problem as you do not have the ability to do this, plus making changes may also break other sites.

Thankfully there is a solution that allows you to apply these url filters on a per site basis, at least for Jetty anyway, I have not tested on any of the other servlet containers such as Tomcat, but the same solution is likely possible.

in your web root you will have a "web-inf" folder which is created automatically and contains your Railo context, inside this folder create a web.xml file and paste in the below contents. 
This will allow the most common SEO URL  "index.cfm/something" to work, I have also included the required filters for MangoBlog. Now you just need to modify this file within each of your sites and add any required url-filters.
The only caveat is that you need to restart your app server in order for the settings to take affect, if you are using the Helicon Zoo module that I blogged about previously then you simply need to recycle your application pool. This can be achieved by editing your web.config as any change to this file forces IIS to recycle the application pool.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
 
<web-app
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
metadata-complete="true"
version="2.5"
>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>index.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/post.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/archives.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/page.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/author.cfm/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/feeds.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

Some weeks back I was talking with HeliconTech after they kindly donated a license for their Helicon APE product for use on cfmldeveloper.com my free CFML developer hosting community. And the topic of Railo came up as they noticed I also support Railo on cfmldeveloper, and they were telling me how they like to support niche technologies like this on Windows/IIS and were looking to add some new Java solutions, so we started discussing the requirements of a new Helicon ZOO module for Railo and what it lacked on the IIS platform. 
I explained to them how ColdFusion worked out of the box and the disadvantage of Railo requiring all the extra manual config of a Jakarta vDir, isapi Plugins, handler mappings and virtual hosts in the Servlet engine in order to make it work, and how a simpler ColdFusion like solution was needed, ideally using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. 
They also asked for a popular open source app that they could also build an installer for and bundle with Railo, so I suggested Mura CMS.

After only 1 month and a few more email exchanges, I am excited to announce that HeliconTech have already completed the new Installer module for both Railo and MuraCMS and added them to the Web Platform Installer, now that is fast work I must say, I was impressed..... cont...

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