I thought this would hit the blogsphere a little harder, but Vince Bonfanti was able to get a heavily modified version of Open BlueDragon running on Google Apps. The announcement is a bit buried in a Google Group list for Open Blue Dragon, but the announcement is pretty exciting, because it opens up a new alternative for hosting a ColdFusion application and it's free for pageviews less than 5 million a month.
Here's what Vince had to say about what was required to get things running:
No, this wasn't done using precompiled CFML templates--it's running a
"raw" CFML page just as you normally would.The Google App Engine (GAE) puts a number of restrictions on Java
servlets, the most significant for OpenBD are: (1) you can't write to
the file system (but you can read from it); (2) you can't create
"background" threads; (3) you can't use any of the java.net.* classes;
and, (4) you can't use any of the java.awt.* classes. There are a
number of other restrictions when accessing the Java class libraries.Basically, I modified the OpenBD code to workaround these
restrictions. This meant things like not writing out the
bluedragon.xml configuration file, writing logs to System.out instead
of the bluedragon.log file, disabling runtime error logging, etc. It
also meant removing or disabling some features, such as CFCHART,
CFTHREAD, CFHTTP, CFLDAP, CFMAIL, CFSCHEDULE, etc., which won't run in
the GAE environment due to the Java class library restrictions.We still have a bit of work to do to clean this up to make it ready
for public consumption. I've handed this off to Alan Williamson, who's
going to work on modifying CFQUERY to work with the datastore (GAE
does not support SQL datasources).While we're working on this, I'd recommend becoming familiar with the
Google App Engine for Java:http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html
I'd especially recommend becoming familiar with the Eclipse plug-in:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/eclipse.html
As you can see, there's a lot of modifications that were required and some that may even be deal killers depending on your requirements, but there's still plenty of opportunities to build something exciting.
This would be an excellent way to put an idea to production without investing anything but your time.
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