XMPP Gateway

Scott, a few questions may help guide us to a solution for you (and many of them could help Michael as well, if he may still see this thread, or anyone else who may in the future).

That said, before I ask those, we should note that this xmpp event gateway is deprecated since CF2016 (more on that below), but Michael was asking abotu CF11 and perhaps you are also, Scott.  And while Adobe no longer supports anything older than CF2018 (and it's a real security risk to run anything older than that), sometimes people do "come to the garage here with their classics" seeking help, and we in the community try to offer it (though some would say we ought not "enable" folks on older versions).

Anyway, now on to those questions:

1.  When you refer to jbuddy no longer being in business, do you mean Zion software? or someplace else?
2.  If you do mean Zion, do you mean you are using their cf-jbuddy product, or something else? Did you or someone else before you install that info your CF?
3. Or are you just trying to use what's built-in to CF? If the latter, what XMPP server are you trying to talk to? Something on your machine or elsewhere?
4.  Are you really saying it was working for you, Scott, before a CF11 update (as Michael described)? Or are you only trying to use the CF xmpp gateway for the first time, perhaps?
5.  If it was working for you before, what CF 11 update were you on BEFORE and which did you apply NOW? And Michael? Then Scott, if you're only trying this for the first time, what update of CF11 are you on? (Or might you be on a version other than CF11? You don't say.)
6. Note that the problem may not really be about a change in CF (an update you applied) but rather a change in the JVM you are using. Someone (you or a colleague) could have changed CF 11 from running on Java 7 to 8, for instance. It may be that something about jbuddy is sensitive to that. If you may confirm that's changed, perhaps at the same time as your CF update, it would be interesting to hear if it "worked" after switching the Java back to whatever it was before (whether you uinstall any CF update that you did, or not).
7.  To all who want this to work, note that if you can't get it working with newer versions of CF or Java, consider running an older version of CF at the same time, whether on the same machine or another, if you "need" to get this functionality working. Or really, just look for more modern ways to implement messaging, as there are many.

To be clear, Adobe marked this xmpp event gateway as deprecated in CF2016, then unsupported in CF2018, as indicated on the deprecated features page (where they refer to it by the more generic name jabber, which was one xmpp server implementation and resource site from the early 2000's, when xmpp started to take off). 

A last option to consider is to leverage a java library for XMPP, and there are a few such options offered at xmpp.org.  As some may know, CF can call Java natively (since CF in fact runs on Java). Granted, it's not as simple as calling CFML (though it's sometimes only barely more complicated).

We just have to recognize that sometimes some CFML functionality just never takes off in the community, so that there are few using it or talking about it, and Adobe decides to let it go. In such cases, we may have to "forage on our own" for an alternative.  I've given a few here, as well as asked questions that may help me or others reading this to perhaps chime in with some other ideas for you.