What happens if we had a number of components that we wanted to distribute to people? You could, of course, zip it up, provide instructions for people to unzip it, and so on. Also, if you want to provide code for other people to use, but you want to protect your intellectual property, you might not want to allow people to see the code itself (of course, we at Railo Technologies disagree because we are an open source project, but we understand there are cases where you wouldn't want to allow the users of your code to access it). Railo Server provides a solution with Railo Archives (.ra) and Secure Railo Archives (.ras).
Let's turn our little API into a Railo Archive.