ColdFusion Gateway Data passed by Reference?

At our company tech summit just held the past few days (where all us remote developers get together and discuss all things technical) I had the opportunity to show off some of the cool new CFML Gateways functionality that ships with CF 8. I had created a generic object that could be called at any point in the application that would allow asynchronous threading of method executions where we needed it. I would execute

SendGatewayMessage(gatewayid, structure)

call which would then go through the cfml gateway and exeute the method that ColdSpring new about (code to come).

This was all great and fun, but what I wanted to know is this:

'What if I have an object that has it's data changed from inside the gateway. Will the calling page know about that change, and does the calling page still have reference to the object?'.

Objects and Structures are passed by 'reference' in ColdFusion. But what if that object is being manipulated in an Asynchronous process that is executing in a CFML Event Gateway in a separate thread from the original? That was my 'Poll the audience' question in which I asked our developers to think about and come up with their answer -

A - The Object would Change
B - The Object would not Chanage

I put together a CFC and Gateway call that tested this theory.

1.) Create an Object and assign a value through an accessor method i.e. setTitle('Bank Foreclosure Professional')

2.) Append that object to the data 'structure' that I am passing to the 'SendGateWayMessage(gatewayid, structure)

3.) Dump Data of the Object to a cfm page

4.) Call the Gateway and pass the structure containing the object

5.) Within the gateway call, do a thread sleep for 2.5 seconds and then call a setTitle('I have changed') on the Object.

6.) Meanwhile back on the .cfm page, right after my call to the 'sendgatewaymessage' function i will dump the value of the object again to the page (as this dump will happen immediately after the sendgatewaymessage call is executed asynchronously)

7.) On the .cfm page I will do a thread sleep for 5 seconds to make sure the gateway has enough time to change the value of the object.

8.) Finally, once I feel I've waited long enough, I'll dump the results of the Original Object to the page....

The Results????

You may be surprised at the results - and in the room of 9 people, we split the room in half with 'No Change' and 'Change' votes - the tie breaker coming from our Project Manager who (like myself) guessed 'NO Change' (i.e. there is no reference to the original object once it get's passed into the gateway and executes).

Who was right?? Please provide your comments and I'll let you know what I found out and who won the Poll (I'll post the code for those who want to see it and prove it on their own)