Event Gateway Services are used to pass events from external sources to certain ColdFusion components defined to handle those requests. They provide a generalized asynchronous messaging system to facilitate communications with a variety of possible resources, including SMS and Java Sockets.
ColdFusion Event Gateways offer a powerful set of tools that make performing advanced tasks easy. At its core, Event Gateways take various forms of input and map the requests to CFC’s for processing. For example, you can listen on a port and map communication to a CFC, or you can watch a directory for file activity and map the actions to a CFC. ColdFusion ships with several example gateways to help you get started. You can find them in the {cf-root}\WEB-INF\cfusion\gateway directory on J2EE configurations or the {cf-root}\gateway directory on server configurations.
General settings are accessed from this page. Similar to the Request Tuning options, Event Gateways can be tuned for performance by granting access to threads and limiting the total number of events that can be queued in case all threads are busy. These settings are application specific and must be determined by observing your application under load in a controlled environment. Learn more about performance tuning ColdFusion here.
ColdFusion also ships with an SMS test server, which can be useful during the development of SMS applications.
If Event Gateways are not being used, the engine should be disabled for security and performance reasons. They are disabled (unchecked) by default.