Getting a 404 when trying to use the taffy RESTful API framework on ColdFusion 8/Windows Server 2003/IIS6

Question

I have been tasked with creating an API for our ColdFusion 8 based CMS system. After doing some research I decided that a RESTful API would be the best bet for three reasons:

1. Its down right simple to use
2. Fairly easy to implement
3. Excellent long term solution

Seeing as I am first an foremost an application/systems programmer, high level web development is not my forte, so rather than reinventing the wheel I started looking at some frameworks for our API.

I settled on Taffy mainly because I found its design more elegant than PowerNap and FW/1, however I am having some trouble implementing it.

As per the documentation I have placed the unzipped "taffy" folder in our web root as well as created an api directory inside of our development site -

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/dev.cms/api_mk3

Inside are directories:

/resources/studentCollection.cfc
/resources/studentMember.cfc
/Application.cfc
/index.cfm

The contents of all four files are as follows:

studentCollection.cfc

<cfscript>
component extends="taffy.core.resource" taffy:uri="/students" {
    public function get() {
        //query the database for matches, making use of optional parameter "eyeColor" if provided
        //then...
        var someCollectionObject = ArrayNew(1);
        someCollectionObject[1] = "Jason Bristol";
        return representationOf(someCollectionObject).withStatus(200); //collection might be query, array, etc
    }
}
</cfscript>

studentMember.cfc

<cfscript>
component extends="taffy.core.resource" taffy:uri="/students/{personName}" {
    public function get(string personName) {
        //find the requested person, by name
        //then...
        return noData().withStatus(404);//representationOf(personName).withStatus(200); //member might be a structure, ORM entity, etc
    }
}
</cfscript>

Application.cfc

<cfcomponent extends="taffy.core.api">
<cfscript>

    this.name = 'CMS-API';

    variables.framework = {};
    variables.framework.debugKey = "debug";
    variables.framework.reloadKey = "reload";
    variables.framework.reloadPassword = "true";
    variables.framework.representationClass = "taffy.core.genericRepresentation";
    variables.framework.returnExceptionsAsJson = true;

    // do your onApplicationStart stuff here
    function applicationStartEvent() {
    }

    // do your onRequestStart stuff here
    function requestStartEvent() {
    }

    // this function is called after the request has been parsed and all request details are known
    function onTaffyRequest(verb, cfc, requestArguments, mimeExt) {
        // this would be a good place for you to check API key validity and other non-resource-specific validation
        return true;
    }

</cfscript>

index.cfm

Blank, as per the documentation.

The issue I am having is if I were to navigate to

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/dev.cms/api_mk3/index.cfm/students

I will get a 404

[14:57:02.963] GET http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/dev.cms/api_mk3/index.cfm/students [HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found 56ms]

Request URL:
http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/dev.cms/api_mk3/index.cfm/students


Request Method:
GET


Status Code:
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found



Request Headers
14:57:02.000

User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Host:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Connection:keep-alive
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate
Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8


Sent Cookie
CFTOKEN:85979056CFID:1194857



Response Headers
Δ56ms

X-Powered-By:ASP.NETServer:Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Date:Fri, 17 May 2013 18:57:37 GMT
Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection:close

Now assuming I am understanding everything correctly, I should have a .json formatted response of "Jason Bristol" or something along those lines.

I suspect that there is an issue with MIME types or URL rewriting in IIS6, but I don't know the specifics on how to correct this. I have been pushing for an upgrade to Windows Server 2008 RC2 for quite some time now, but with no luck.

Is this operator error or is this fixable?

EDIT: I am getting nothing in the CF logs from what I can see. Below is the entry from the IIS Log:

2013-05-20 13:56:20 W3SVC4 10.40.204.236 GET /dev.cms/api_mk3/index.cfm/students - 80 - 70.88.47.65 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.1;+WOW64)+AppleWebKit/537.31+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/26.0.1410.64+Safari/537.31 404 0 0

Answer 1

This is a known issue on plain vanilla installations on tomcat. (If you use tomcat?)

You could add an additional servlet mapping in your web.xml file.

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/api/index.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

https://github.com/atuttle/Taffy/wiki/404-issue-with-Railo-or-Tomcat-and-API-in-a-sub-folder

Answer 2

This:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/dev.cms/api_mk3/index.cfm/students

does not look like a valid url. index.cfm is a web page so adding directories after it does not make sense. If students is a subfolder, you want something like this:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/dev.cms/api_mk3/students

If there is an index or default file in that folder, it should come up. Otherwise you have to specify a file in that folder.