Twilio Synch token in ColdFusion - json

Question

ColdFusion being as obscure as it is, Twilio doesn't have any SDKs for it. I'm trying to give Synch a go; I'm not getting the JSON request for the access token correct. Trying to mimic what is done by their node.js example here, I thought I could just output the JSON to the page on token.cfm:
{
"identity":"#Username#",
"token":["#AccountSID#","#APPSID#","#SECRET#"]
}
This is called from index.cfm:
<script src="js/jquery.js" ></script>
<script src="https://media.twiliocdn.com/sdk/js/sync/releases/0.5.7/twilio-sync.min.js"></script>
<script>
function fetchAccessToken(handler) {
// We use jQuery to make an Ajax request to our server to retrieve our
// Access Token
$.getJSON('token.cfm', function(data) {
// The data sent back from the server should contain a long string, which
// is the token you'll need to initialize the SDK. This string is in a format
// called JWT (JSON Web Token) - more at http://jwt.io
console.log(data.token);
// Since the starter app doesn't implement authentication, the server sends
// back a randomly generated username for the current client, which is how
// they will be identified while sending messages. If your app has a login
// system, you should use the e-mail address or username that uniquely identifies
// a user instead.
console.log(data.identity);
handler(data);
});
}
$(document).ready(function()
{
fetchAccessToken(initializeSync);
function initializeSync(tokenResponse) {
var syncClient = new Twilio.Sync.Client(tokenResponse.token);
// Use syncClient here
}
});
</script>
The response I receive is
{code: 400, message: "Unable to process JSON"}
code:
400
message:
"Unable to process JSON"
Can I accomplish this? Or, alternately, can the token be built by JavaScript alone?

Answer 1

Your JS is a very roundabout way of writing this:
$(function() {
$.get('token.cfm').done(function (response) {
var syncClient = new Twilio.Sync.Client(response.token);
// ... use syncClient here
});
});
but this still requires that the response is actually parseable as JSON.
If your CFM page just contains this:
<cfoutput>
{
"identity":"#Username#",
"token":["#AccountSID#","#APPSID#","#SECRET#"]
}
</cfoutput>
then this almost certainly produces syntactically wrong JSON. Don't do that.
JSON is to be produced from a data structure and a serialization function, that's no different in ColdFusion than in any other language.
<cfset AccountSID = "...">
<cfset APPSID = "...">
<cfset SECRET = "...">
<cfset tokenData = {
"identity" = Username,
"token" = [AccountSID, APPSID, SECRET]
}>
<cfcontent type="application/json"><cfoutput>#SerializeJSON(tokenData)#</cfoutput>
There are other, nicer ways of creating JSON responses, most prominently CF components with functions annotated with the "json" returnformat, but doing it manually like above is enough for a one-off.