I just got a new 4 GIG USB stick and I am trying to avoid having to tote my laptop home for the holidays. So I am setting up a portable development environment.

I did this before using Railo and while Railo is a good CF engine I am developing a new business to run on CF 8. I was reading up on Running CF on JREE and noticed that that the Coldfusion installer created a WAR file that you can deploy CF on a JREE server, specifically JBoss. Then I remembered that JBoss runs on Tomcat. Light bulb! So I tried it out. I created a WAR file and deployed it on Tomcat. It did complain about "Error [Thread-26] - Java heap space", but it worked.

So here is the setup.

Download the following:
ColdFusion Server Evaluation version.  /http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/
XAMPP standard ://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#641
XAMPP Tomcat plug-in. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#644

Optional: You can snag the Java runtime buy downloading one of Railo servers that come with the Java Run time. Look for “with-jre-“ in the file name. This will save you from having to install the Java runtime on any computers that don’t have Java installed. You may have to experiment as to where you need to put it. Most probably the root directory of the drive, or under the root of tomcat. I forgot how, I did it but I did get it to work before.

http://www.railo-technologies.com/en/index.cfm?treeID=224

Instructions:

Run the CF installer and Choose the JREE version (third option) and create a WAR file and save it to disk. I did not try to install the .Net, ODBC or Search services (You are on your own on this).
Unzip XAMPP. I recommend using the ZIP archive or the Self extracting 7-ZIP archive to avoid having to install it.
Unzip XAMPP Tomcat plug-in on top of XAMPP.
Run the setup_xampp.bat fond in the XAMPP root.
Run the startup.bat EX: F:\XAMPP\tomcat\bin\ startup.bat

Point you browser tohttp://localhost:8080/ and go to the “Tomcat Manager”. The default User/Pass is xampp/xampp.

Near the bottom of the Tomcat Web Application Manager page is the “WAR file to deploy” section Use the “Select WAR file to upload” to upload the WAR file you created. You can upload the RDS.war as well. I have not tested this yet.

I recommend that you put a copy of XAMPP on a local hard drive and deploy the WAR file your local hard drive and then copy the contents of the “C:\XAMPP \tomcat\webapps\cfusion” dir to your thumb drive. See below for the reason why. I was not able to deploy CF to the thumb drive. It hung for about 20 before I got sick of waiting.

After this point your browser to http://localhost:8080/cfusion/CFIDE/administrator/ to finish the installation.

Notes:
You can run the other bat files like tomcat_service_install.bat if you want to install it as a service and all that.

You can change the port to 80 by editing one of the xml files. I forgot which one. Look at the docs or Google it.

USB sticks are *slow*. It takes a long time to copy directories with lots of files. XAMPP took a good 10 min or so copy to the USB drive.