What pitfalls await me when I migrate from CF6.1 to CF8 or Railo3.1?

Question

Google does not really deliver much content (or my query sucks). Has anyone made the switch and can share the experience?

Answer 1

We found that when we upgraded to CF 8:

Carraige returns are stripped in plain text emails. We found we had to be explicit about line feed characters by creating a var like so <cfset CRLF = "#Chr(13)##Chr(10)#"> and inserting it in the plain text email where we needed the line feed. We eventually went to HTML emails.

Third party jar files caused problems due to the order in which jar files are loaded. Certain jar files must appear first in the java classpath as defined in cfroot/runtime/bin/jvm.config. This was a messy workaround and we have discontinued using that jar.

Also make sure to patch immediately to 8.0.1. We had a performance nightmare becuase of this issue.

Best of luck!

Answer 2

I haven't had any CFMX 6.1 apps to switch across, but Railo is definitely my CFML engine of choice.

Compatibility-wise, there is very unlikely to be any significant issues migrating from CFMX 6.1, and you can easily test this with the Express version - no installation required!

Railo can be stricter about certain aspects of CFML, so you might get a few errors if you exploit bugs/weaknesses with CF, but nothing really to worry about.

And, if you do get stuck on anything, the Railo mailing list is active with plenty of friendly helpful people who can help to get you going again.