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Using CFHTTP to Interact with the Web

The CFHTTP tag is one of the more powerful tags in the CFML tag set. It can be used to:

HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, manages a variety of communications between Web clients and servers . The method by which a transaction is executed determines both what the server processes and what is delivered to the browser . In addition to HTML documents, HTTP supports content types such as binary files, graphics, audio, and video through the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard.

The HTTP standard specifies that information about a client request and a server response, as well as the status of a transaction are generated in request and response headers as part of an HTTP session. The HTTP protocol has several communication methods used to exchange information between a client and a server. The CFHTTP tag implements the most commonly used methods, GET and POST. CFHTTP syntax is quite simple but offers a number of options for specifying output, resolving links, and building queries from delimited text files.

Allaire Alive

A video titled, "Creating Web Agents" is available at http://alive.allaire.com. It gives an overview of HTTP and covers the use of CFHTTP for creating automated processes such as:

The video is part of Allaire Alive, an educational service that offers Web videos on topics specific to ColdFusion development and application deployment as well as broader industry issues. The titles are available free for online viewing or download.

Using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with CFHTTP

There is a limitation on ColdFusion's ability to handle SSL transactions with CFHTTP on Windows NT. See Knowledge Base article #1096 at http://www.allaire.com/Support/KnowledgeBase/SearchForm.cfm for details.


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