One of the nice things about Railo is its Virtual File Systems, or "Resources" as they're sometimes called. While Railo offers serveral Resources, one of my favorite ones is the built in Resource for Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service). It basically allows you to connect to anything in your Amazon S3 account using any file related CF tag or function, without any extra CF code or CFC calls.

This can be done very easily, as Gert demonstrates here. You just use the S3 Resource in your file source path to connect to Amazon, and it behaves just like you're connecting to something on your server's local file system:

I've recently seen a demo of the Amazon S3 REST Wrapper, and it's a pretty sweet CFC. That's actually what convinced me to finally start using Amazon's S3. But the fact that Railo allows me to use CF's native tags and functions to connect directly to S3 is even better!

You can even create CF Mappings directly to your Amazon S3 account, and reference it in your code just like any other CF mapping. And that's not just for the S3 Resource, with Railo's other built in Resources you can create mappings to things like FTP sites and ZIP files too.

Using the FTP Resource to connect to an FTP server is just as easy as using the S3 Resource. To borrow an example found here, you can write directly to an FTP site using the cffile tag:

I haven't fully explored Railo's Virtual File Systems to see what others are out there, but I'm sure if they're anything like the S3 Resource, I won't be disappointed!