Gateways can use a configuration file to specify information that does not change frequently. For example, the ColdFusion SMS event gateway configuration file contains values that include an IP address, port number, system ID, password, and so on.
You can specify a configuration file path for each event gateway instance in the ColdFusion MX Administrator. ColdFusion passes the file path in the gateway constructor when it instantiates the event gateway. The configuration file format and content handling is up to you. It is the responsibility of the gateway class to parse the file contents and use it meaningfully.
One good way to access and get configuration data is to use the java.util.Properties class. This class takes an ISO8859-1 formatted input stream with one property setting per line. Each property name must be separated from the value by an equal sign (=) or a colon (:), as the following example shows:
ip-address=127.0.0.1
port=4445
The example SocketGateway event gateway uses this technique to get an optional port number from a configuration file. For an example of reading a properties file and using its data, see the code in Class constructor.