Having ColdFusion run on the new Windows Server 2008 server under IIS 7 is pretty easy, however you have to have the right components installed.

Windows 2008 uses lots of routines from Vista, so installs are really easy, and in this version, instead of installing everything, and then disabling the features, 2008 simpy doesnt install them.

This is nice to see, we now get a screen that asks you to select the features you wish to use on this server. Tick the boxes for IIS and you have a website server.

To get ColdFusion running on the same machine, you need to do the following:

• Install 2008 server
• Add the Web Server (IIS) role
• Select ISAPI Filters
• Select IIS 6 Management Compatability

Restart IIS and Install ColdFusion as normal. Everything should be working just fine.

Recently I discussed how to set up HTTP Compression in IIS 6 using its native gzip support.

Here are a couple of tools you can use to verify your compression is set up correctly. Both tell you pretty much the same information, simply enter your URL and it tells you the result, and how much you have saved.

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URL Rewriting allows you to recode ugly URLs like

...while having a valid url...

...still passed to ColdFusion or your coding language of choice.

Using the url examples above I will take you through implementation of rewriting in Apache with mod_rewrite and in IIS using a plugin ISAPI_Rewrite.

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When bandwidth becomes an issue, it is possible to enable HTTP compression between the web server and the browser. This increases CPU load on the web server by a small amount, but can provide fairly massive reductions in page sizes (in the order of 75%).

Compression is part of the HTTP/1.1 specification, which means that most browsers since 1999 support it. In the rare cases where a browser doesn't support the technique, the server will discover this in the initial HTTP handshake and deliver uncompressed pages instead.

To enable HTTP compression for your IIS webserver, changes are made to the IIS server settings. Note that while this will require a restart of IIS, it shouldn't require CF to be restarted.

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