If you have to call a web service from ColdFusion 7 - and the destination web service enforces bilateral SSL authentication (i.e. the caller has to supply a client certificate to prove who they are, as well as the destination supplying a server certificate to prove who it is...) - then the options, in descending order of preference are:

1. Check / ask really nicely / beg / etc. to see if there is a way of calling the web service without passing a client SSL certificate
2. Use CF8 (or later) - I believe that you will still need to do the SOAP generation by hand, as cfobject / cfinvoke do not appear to allow a client certificate to be set - but you can use cfhttp and specify the clientcert and clientcertpassword attributes - which avoids having to use the WinHttp.WinHttpRequest COM object as shown below.
3. Use the WinHttp.WinHttpRequest COM object as shown below...

ColdFusion (when running on windows) allows (and has allowed for several versions) COM objects to be called from within CF code, using the CFOBJECT tag or CreateObject() function.

Built into the following versions of windows, is the WinHTTP 5.1 COM object:

WinHTTP 5.1 is available only with Windows Server 2003, Windows XP with Service Pack 1 (SP1), and Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 3 (SP3). (I suspect that it may also be available in Windows 2008)

This provides similar functionality to CFHTTP - but at a lower level.  In particular it allows a client certificate to be specified, using the SetClientCetificate function.

This is not as simple as it seems - where as in CF8 using CFHTTP you just have to specify the physical location of the client certificate file - the WinHttp object requires that the client certificate is first imported into a certificate store - and then the reference to the certificate provided to the SetClientCetificate function:

ClientCertificate [in]

Specifies the location, certificate store, and subject of a client certificate

To cut a very long (well around 5 hours) story short, this is how I finally got it to work:

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I am in the (fun!) process of documenting an application I created nearly 5 years ago, in which the majority of the functionality is controlled by the database (it's a business workflow automation tool).

Reverse engineering substantially reduces the size of the task - Visio's Database > Reverse Engineer... command is a real time saver when you have foreign key constraints defined, makes generation of an ERD no more complicated than arranging all the boxes so that none (or few!) of the relationship lines cross!

A little utility contributed to the Code Project website makes the process of creating table and field documentation much easier: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/sqldoc.aspx

This utility can be pointed at a SQL server database, and will generate an HTML document listing all the tables and fields in the database, together with data types, nullable, default values and description fields from the db schema.

It uses an XSLT transformation to convert the xml generated to an HTML document. This can be edited so that it's closer to final requirements - I have updated the XSLT to place anchors on each table name, and links at the top of the file to each table.

This makes it a much less arduous task to document each table and field - I can edit the file in dreamweaver and just add descriptions for each field and table.

I am in the process of converting a Fusebox 5.1 application to an MVC implementation.

This is a relatively complex task, as I am also wanting to split the application into 2 - in order to allow shared functionality to be implemented once, and create another instance of the application with a different controller, and some unique functionality.

I was a little stumped at first to know how to visualise the folder structure for the application - I started laying it out within Visio - but quickly realised that this was not sustainable - Visio is great for visualising many aspects of an application design - but its not ideal for representing a large tree structure.

Then I thought - what about using XML - XML is great for representing hierarchical structures - and using the design view within the Eclipse WTP XML editor, its very quick to add, edit, move, and duplicate elements.

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