Either I wasn't paying enough attention to the Railo website, or they don't explain well enough how licensing for the Community Edition works. Probably both. But I got a suprise on my Railo-based website yesterday...
In any case, I was a little suprised when a pre-production website running on Railo stopped working, instead showing a 500-level error message that explained that the developer edition was limited to access by 10 IP addresses. I was aware of this limitation for the developer edition, but I didn't think I'd run into the problem since I had downloaded what I thought was the Community Edition, and the site doesn't mention any IP restrictions for that software.
Turns out while reading the Download page that I didn't quite understand the import of the sentence "The necessary license keys in order to change the version to a Community, Professional or Enterprise can be purchased on the licence page." I thought that you would either download the Developer version or the Community edition. Nope. You're always downloading the developer edition until you enter a license into the server admin to enable it as the non-IP-restricted Community edition.
This is perfectly reasonable for Railo Technologies to do-- I have no arguments with it. But what I would suggest to Gert and Michael is that they emphasize the need for the licensing more, by 1) bolding or calling out the sentence about licensing on the download page; 2) embedding the term "develop" in the software filename; or 3) putting a more obvious message in the admin to let the user know that the Railo software can be enabled to the Community version. Right now the serial page mentions nothing like that. They also might want to let users know beforehand that if they do enable the Community version, they'll lose access to anything they've entered in the server-level settings (since those settings aren't available in Community).
Oh, and by the way, I supported Railo today with a donation. You should, too.
Comments (10)
February 12, 2009
9:12AM | #
I ran into this problem as well when setting up my Railo server. Glad to know I'm not the only one.
Their signup capcha was hard for me too ( 9 tries ).
Otherwise a great product.
February 12, 2009
9:55AM | #
I also ran into it. :)
February 12, 2009
11:01AM | #
I confess, I ran into it as well. Mine wasn't mission critical. There was a lot of confusion about the sudden disappearance of stuff in the server.cfm.
Make sure you report this on the railo group on sucky yahoo groups.
February 12, 2009
11:10AM | #
Like Todd said, once you enter your license people should know that pretty much everything disappears from the server Admin, so mappings, datasources, etc has to be done per web context from teh web admin.
I'm pretty sure I've heard that OS Railo 3.1 will have a full-featured server admin, though.
February 12, 2009
1:00PM | #
Thank you for posting this, I definitely overlooked the need for the community license myself.
February 12, 2009
1:31PM | #
@Tony: 3.1 will have a full-featured redesigned server admin.
February 12, 2009
3:02PM | #
Todd, that's great news that 3.1 will have a full-featured server admin. How do you know? Are you participating in any way with Railo? I've offered them my time to help with coding or documentation, but haven't gotten a response.
February 16, 2009
8:42AM | #
Hi guys,
you're right. It's not obvious at all. So I put an emphasis on it (red and bold, should I make it blink as well :-) ?).
The server admin in Railo 3.1 will be full featured (except admin synch and cluster scope) which will be available as separate extensions. Besides that, we're looking forward for the end of March as well...
Thanks a lot four all your support guys.
Gert
February 16, 2009
5:34PM | #
Hmmm..got the license...
But where do you enter it? Searched Railo for a while, on the net.
cant find anything on actually entering a railo license?
February 17, 2009
9:23AM | #
@Gert: Thanks for making the change on your site! The
tag won't be necessary, though. ;)@Misty: You can enter the license number on the Security > Serial section of Railo's server administrator (e.g., "/railo-context/admin/server.cfm?action=security.serial").