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It is long overdue, but a tutorial on how to create your own Railo extension provider is now available on the wiki. Why would you ever want to build your own extension provider? Perhaps you are a framework developer and you want to provide your users running Railo a 'one-click' installation / update. Perhaps you are managing several Railo servers and you want your internal servers to update to your the latest application / custom cfc / built-in-tags/functions, etc.

If you're unfamiliar with what Railo extensions are, they're essentially plug-ins that are available via the Railo team or with the help of the tutorial, you can create your own. If you want to see Railo extensions in action, you can log into your own web context ( http://{YOUR SERVER}/railo-context/admin/web.cfm?action=extension.applications ) and Railo will instantly download and install the many available frameworks (ColdBox, Fusebox, Model Glue, ColdSpring, Mach II, cfwheels, etc.) and applications ( Farcry, Mura, Galleon, Mangoblog, etc).

The Railo team also offers paid extensions (Amazon S3, cluster scope, admin sync, cfvideo and more) via the server context ( http://{YOUR SERVER}/railo-context/admin/server.cfm?action=extension.applications ).

Straker, the makers of ShadoCMS and Zoom Flex have put up a great blog posting regarding using Railo in a Software as a Service environment.

They cover four areas such as Scalability, Security, Cost and Updates and even though it shows the Railo Server as a winner it is a overally fairly balanced article from the point of view of their requirements

Check out the full blog post on the Straker Blog

In case you didn't already know, alurium.com are providing a 60 day free trial of Railo hosting.

You can of course, later upgrade to various packages, but if you want to see how Railo performs on a production site, without having to stump up the cash yourself, this is a great offer.

You get:
100 MB Disk Space
1024 MB Bandwidth
1 Email Accounts
1 FTP Accounts
1 MySQL Databases
Which of course is more than enough to get you going! Why not it a whirl!

In my last post I wrote about using RAM as a nice resource to render things from. For this post I shall go through doing a quick demo of the database resource.

That's right. You can use a database exacly like you would a file system.

Before we get started, with the latest version of Railo you need to first add the following line into your <web-root>/WEB-INF/railo/railo-web.xml.cfm

<resources> ...
<resource-provider arguments="case-sensitive:true;lock-timeout:1001;prefix:test_;" class="railo.commons.io.res.type.datasource.DatasourceResourceProvider" scheme="db"/>
</resources>

It might be there already but commented out. This essentially adds another resource that you can use to create mappings.

Next, just create a database in mysql, nothing fancy, you just need to then create a datasource in either your web or server admin. I called mine "resourcedb" (imaginative eh?)

Now that we have the database, we need to create a mapping to this database. To address this newly created datasource as a mapping we add the following under the Archives & Resources - Mappings section.

Virtual: /dbresource
Resource: db://resourcedb

Now you are set! Here is my code now:

<cfif NOT DirectoryExists("/dbresource/elvis/")>
	<cfdirectory action="create" directory="/dbresource/elvis"/>	
</cfif>
<cffile action="write" file="/dbresource/elvis/dump.cfm" output="<cfdump eval=server>">
<cfdirectory action="list" directory="/dbresource" name="dbfiles" recurse="true"/>
<cfdump eval=dbfiles />

And you should now get a nice list of the files in your db resource. This is useful if you want to share these files across distributed servers without exposing the file system itself.