The Benefits & Myths of Lucee Hosting

When someone brings up the conversation of trying Lucee as a supplement to their Adobe ColdFusion development there’s some awkwardness. They’ve heard about Lucee, want to try it but it’s also mysterious and new. They aren’t convinced yet. And I don’t blame them.

Lucee Hosting can be a shortcut to overcoming those barriers. Usually if someone get’s a chance to get familiar with Lucee, they are hooked (PS: Lucee Hosting makes this easy vs a worrying about local environment). You can get a pre-setup Lucee VPS much less than a equally equipped Adobe ColdFusion VPS. Or shared Lucee Hosting plan for $5.

Debunking Myths About Lucee

1. Compatibility? CFML written for Adobe ColdFusion is compatible. See the supported tag list, and Lucee Server explanation.
2. Ease of use? Lucee is surprisingly like Adobe ColdFusion in that you have access to a web based admin panel for managing things.
3. How to start locally? Download Lucee of course choose express, latest-stable. Launch Lucee by running \bin\start.bat or /bin/start.sh (depending on platform) and open: http://127.0.0.1:8888
   1. Note if you have trouble starting Lucee, be sure you have the latest JDK. You can find it at in the Oracle JDK downloads or directly JDK 8 here.
   2. Webroot: /lucee-{version}-express/webapps/ROOT
   3. Admin URL: http://127.0.0.1:8888/lucee/admin/server.cfm
   4. Web Context URL: http://127.0.0.1:8888/lucee/admin/web.cfm
4. How to start hosting? We’ve prepared both Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting completely.
   1. Upload your code with FTP.
   2. Our cPanel or Windows Control Panels will include “Lucee Admin” icons. Use this to launch your web-context to manage all Lucee specific settings for your app.

What is a web context? Each website or app is considered a “context” which is adopted from how Tomcat describes apps in their own world. Each context has it’s own web-admin for specific settings. It’s not required to use it. Don’t get too confused by this, it will make sense the more you use it.

Real Benefits Lucee Offers:

1. Management of settings similar to Adobe ColdFusion. One of the biggest benefits is it’s similarity to Adobe ColdFusion in regards to the Admin settings. Frequently accessed areas like “Datasources” are in almost identical places.
2. Less clutter. Lucee Server is NOT the free version of Adobe ColdFusion, it doesn’t have the same “guts” as ACF. It’s relies on Java, but it’s entirely it’s own “server”. This seems to manifest itself in performance gains – thanks to the original Lucee developers.
3. Open source. What this means is developers can contribute to the overall health of Lucee. It also means as a community we can help Lucee get better.

Lucee Is Creating It’s Own Future

No doubt there’s some passionate folks behind Lucee. There’s a community of CFML enthusiasts using Lucee. Those make Lucee attractive. Lucee Server even has it’s own dialect & extension (.lucee), to accelerate resolving challenges in it’s own way.

We think Lucee Server is pretty great. You should check it out!

Categories: Hosting