Let me start by saying that I’m no java expert. I’ve done bits and pieces with it over the years, but never done any major projects with it. Anyhow, a few days ago I posted on how we’ve been using CF7’s event gateway architecture to talk to a Java app we’ve currently got in development. It basically uses a serialized object I/O streams to pass objects between the client and the gateway. I’ve created a little demo app to shows how it’s done. It’s pretty rough, but it highlights the principles involved.

The Client is a modified version of a simple chat client. It will open a socket on the gateway and pass message objects back and forth. When the gateway receives a message from the client it passes it to the listener. The listener then hits a quote of the day web service to pass a random message back to the client.

I’ve also add a small feature that will allow you to upload a file to the gateway. It serializes the file by wrapping the file’s byte array in a sterilisable file wrapper object. Thanks to Johanes for the idea on this one. When the gateway receives the file wrapper it passes it to the listener cfc, which give’s it a new filename and passes it back to the client. 

To run it you will need to modify the ant build file to point to your cfusion/gateway/lib directory.  Build the project, setup your gateway type/instance and run the client…blah, blah, blah. Anyhow, the source code should give you the idea on how it works.

You can download it here.