Railo 1.1 Beta

The latest version of Railo is now available as a public beta from the Railo customer center, and it brings with it an exciting new feature: Resources.

Resources are a brilliant feature that allows you to perform file actions on virtual filesystems such as in memory, ZIP archives, and FTP sites.

For example:

<cffile action="copy" source="ram:///myFile.cfm" destination="ftp://user:pass@ftp.myserver.com/myFile.cfm"/>

Better still, you can use resources inside mappings, allowing you to easily abstract the locations and hide authentication details.

<cfdirectory name="Files" action="list" source="/devFiles" filter="*.cfm"/>
<cfloop query="Files">
	<cffile action="copy" source="/devFiles/#FileName#" destination="/publicFiles/#FileName#"/>
</cfloop>

The code above could be copying from the local file system to a remote FTP site, or from a remote FTP site to a local ZIP archive, or anything else - the code doesn't need to know, as it shouldn't do, which is really superb.

You can read more about Resources on the Railo website.

Another great improvement of Railo 1.1 is a speed improvement. Railo was already a very fast CFML compiler (probably even the fastest). And now it is even faster. How? Simply by cutting out the middlemen.

Railo 1.0 worked by converting from CFML to XML to Java Sourcecode to Java Bytecode. Railo 1.1 now goes straight from CFML to Java Bytecode, resulting in extra speed and less memory use.

There are other improvements with Railo 1.1, but these two interest me the most. To read more about the others, keep an eye on the Railo blog.

And if you haven't already, head over to the Railo customer center and get downloading - as the Beta is provided as a Railix package, it doesn't even need installing - just unzip and run.