CFMX 7 and WebSphere.

Well I am by no means an expert but I appreciate the thought.  I was in your shoes about 2 years ago having never dealt with WebSphere.  It's one of those things, now that we have had it up and running I haven't really had to deal with it much anymore.  Which is a good thing I guess.  I will send you a message with some contact info.  I'll help if I can.

We have implemented ColdFusion using WebSphere.  Yes, you will need to deploy ColdFusion as an EAR.  Performance is alright.  When we load tested WebSphere was a bit slower than JRun but it was a large WebSphere shop so opted to go with it.  You will get significant performance gains by at least upgrading to CF8 (even more with CF9).  Also, we had issues deploying on WAS 6.1 ND.  After some back-and-forth with IBM support they finally agreed to fix the issue.  If you are using WAS 6.1 ND, make sure that you use update 21 or higher to get the included fix (it was not an issue with WAS 5.1).

The issue had to do with query string parameters in the URL.  Basically:

    This would work:  http://www.somesite.com/index.cfm?foo=bar

    But this would not work: http://www.somesite.com/?foo=bar

The ColdFusion page would run but it knew nothing about the query string parameter(s).

Also be aware of the ESI caching option on the WebSphere plug-in.  It's not an issue really but it drove us nuts around here during development chasing our tails until we finally figured it out.  It is a check-box in the WAS console for the plug-in that says “Enable Edge Side Include (ESI) processing to cache the responses”.  It definitely caches. ;)

My understanding is that WebSphere only supports deployment of EARs through its administration console.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software

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