Railo Extensions

Railo was designed from the ground up to be easy to extend through the Extension Manager in the administrator. You will be able to download both free and paid extensions to make it easy to add capabilities to your servers. From BlogCFC to frameworks and value added features, the extension manager makes it easy to add capabilities to your Railo CFML web applications.

Railo extensions

The Extension Manager is designed to solve many of the problems that occur when it comes to install applications or extensions. One of the main goals of the extension manager is to extend the Railo core with several functionalities. For example video processing with the tag CFVIDEO is available as an extension that can easily be added to the core functionality of Railo Open Source.
In addition applications can be installed as well. In order to make that as easy as possible, Railo offers an extension API that allows you to create your own extension and offer a webservice that delivers several extensions.

After you have downloaded and installed Railo Open Source, you can easily install further extensions by selecting them in Extension Manager of the corresponding Railo administrators. Extensions can be either Railo extensions like added functionality or applications like a framework or a blog software. Extensions can be installed from either the web or the server administrator. This means that there are:

  • local extensions
    only valid for the web context you have installed them in
  • global extensions
    these extensions can be used in each single web context on the installed server

When you enter the Extension Manager, you will only see either the local or the global extensions, depending in which administrator you are. Just to give you an example: If you install the CFVIDEO extension for a certain web context (e.g. www.mywebsite.com) then it will only work in this web context but it will be much more inexpesive than a global installation which is done in the server administrator and works for every web context you have.

Application extensions

Next to the Railo extensions, you can build your own application that you can install via the Railo Extension Manager. There are different free applications that already have been converted to use the Extension Manager like:

  • Fusebox 5.5
  • Coldbox 2.6.3
  • MachII 1.5
  • ModelGlue 2.0
  • and others

You can build your own extensions by following the Extension API and uploading your extension to the Railo extension provider. You can even build your own extension provider in order to give your customers an update path for your products.