Running ACF Database Examples on Railo

I was excited to read there is an alpha cfspreadsheet extension available for Railo (Written by Andy Jarrett as a fork of the CFPOI project by Matt Woodward.)  As a user of both ACF and Railo I was curious how the two versions of the tag compared.  Being lazy, I decided to use the cfspreadsheet examples from the ACF documentation for some basic tests. While they are convenient, they naturally make use of sample databases included only with ACF.  But it occurred to me, why not just copy the sample databases into Railo and set up a datasource? Then I could easily use the examples with both engines.

So first I located the cfcodexamples database and copied the entire directory beneath my Railo root.

My Local Settings:

ACF:   c:/dev/ColdFusion9/db/cfcodexamples/
Railo: c:/dev/railo321/db/cfcodeexamples/

Next I created the datasource. A quick search turned up these handy instructions for configuring an Apache Derby datasource on Railo, posted by Todd Rafferty.

1) First copy the derby.jar into {railo_server}\lib and restart Railo

My Local Settings:    
c:/dev/railo321/lib/derby.jar

2) Create a new "Other" datasource in Railo. (As this was just for testing, I accepted all the default settings)

My Local Settings:

Name:  cfdocexamples

Class: org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver

Dsn:   jdbc:derby:db/cfdocexamples;create=true

Note:   The database path in the dsn is relative to the application root. I.e.

Root:         c:/dev/railo321/
Database:     c:/dev/railo321/db/cfcodexamples
Relative Path: db/cfdocexamples

Once I verified the datasource.  I was able to run the same cfspreadsheet examples under my Railo install too. Now obviously there are differences between the two engines. So it would be silly to expect every tag example to work exactly the same. But I thought this was an easy way to run some quick comparisons between the two cfspreadsheet tags.