Any major issues keep many from moving to CF2016, specifically?

[Charlie Arehart]

In another thread here, someone made the comment today about CF2016 that they "plan to never upgrade to it. I've read too many forum and blog posts regarding issues with it."

I thought that was a pretty stunning statement, and unduly damning if asserting that many people are hitting some issue that remains unresolved.

I started to offer my reply to it there, but as the reply grew in length (to cover more possibilities and offer help), I thought better of de-railing that thread from its main discussion. So I have created this new thread here and I will point there to this. I have not linked here to that thread, as I'm not trying to make this at all a personal thing toward the commenter. I just want to respond to the comment, whoever might make it. I'm sure others have made it, and I think it deserves more consideration.

So to be clear, since all I do all day is CF server troubleshooting (as an independent consultant, helping about a hundred clients per year), I just want to go on record to say:

I'm not aware of any issues with CF2016 specifically, affecting some large percentage of folks moving to it, which should lead someone to conclude that they should not move to CF2016.  I do have four clarifications to make on that equally broad statement.

1. First, I'll say I have easily a hundred clients who've been running CF2016, and again I'm not aware of any issues affecting a large percentage of folks trying to move to it which a) have proven to be CF2016-specific, or b) didn't have a solution or bug fix. (Of course, I realize there are likely unresolved bugs in CF2016, and they may be affecting some, sure.)
2. Consider also that there have been five CF2016 updates since it's release. They have included hundreds of bug fixes. And sometimes what one may read in a forum or blog post (or tweet or slack thread or FB post) could be from a time BEFORE that fix was made available. Or the people talking about it may not yet have applied it, or may not realize that there are updates one can apply.
3. I will note also that some problems may have been unique to the original CF 2016 installer, when it was released in Feb 2016. There was a new installer in Dec 2016 (removing the bundled API Manager installer and including update 3 and other changes), and yet another in Apr 2017 (for Windows Server 2016, primarily), and those have implemented some things slightly differently, so it pays to know which installer one had used when trying to understand why problems seen by some people are not seen by others.
4. Beware also that what some people complain about as a "CF2016 problem" may really be a problem they're hitting in moving to CF2016 from 10 or 9 or 8, etc, skipping 11 or 10 in the process. I help with that often, where problems folks hit are not ones unique to CF2016, but instead they would have hit them if moving to 11 or 10. There was of course a big gulf between 9 and earlier, and 10 and later, with the change to Tomcat from JRun. And CF11 made changes to charts that affected those using them, and another with cfprocparam and dbvarname. And each release may have its own other compat issues, that generally carry forward. (I document those in a talk I did on what was "new in CF 10, 11, and 2016 that you may have missed", at carehart.org/presentations. I need to draw those out into a blog post.)

Anyway, I understand that sometimes folks will see people reporting problem X in CF2016, or (as in this commenter's case) perhaps many people reporting problems X, Y, and Z. I'm just saying that often such problems have since been resolved, and maybe the reports are old, or the people reporting them have not availed themselves of bug fixes or updates.

If anyone might want to share some big issue that I seem to not be thinking of (not some unique thing affecting only seemingly few, but something that seems to be affecting many), please share your thoughts.

I was torn between creating a blog post (on my own site or the CF community portal) and creating this forum thread. For now, since I do want to engender comment in case I'm missing something, I've started with this. I will then blog it after some time (so let me know if you may want me to acknowledge your contributions or not, if I would add some that I'm missing).

[ServeLife]

Hi Charlie -

I really like your presentation at NCDevCon and I really like this overview of being aware of progressive improvements through the versions. I was stalling with updating CF8 eCommerce applications to CF11 (before CF 2016 was out) all due to one issue at the time with stored procedures and performance issues. Once fixed the normal performance was back but for a while I was not very happy with Adobe and ColdFusion for sure.

However, once CFWebTools found the problem and I backed off an update I was able to port one Membership/eCommerce Application from CF8 straight onto CF11 without any issues whatsoever - and I easily migrated verity to solr. My eSite eCommerce application was ported onto CF2016 with some format issues built in the new ext.CSS that was overriding some formats in admin area but overall the CF8 to CF2016 upgrade in April 2017 went very well and I have used the Security Analyzer with great success.

AND Gasp, 95% of all the older tech like AjaxProxy calls and CFGrids still run great although this is also getting a Phase 2 upgrade. Only issue was the use of a new CF reserved keyword that surfaced along the way that caused the conflict. One last comment is that I took an old CF9 Training review course assets folder from Lynda.com and lo and behold almost 95%of all the examples worked perfectly.

So that's pretty cool. I love CF 2016 and hopefully this persists - systems have been running great - even the version 5 update. I had some help but not that much yet. I do have a lot of real world experience and deeper notes I should coalesce into a presentation sometime. I have also coded in a lot of new functionality using CF 2016 this past "almost a year".

I hope this helps anyone looking to port to CF 2016 and I will try to answer some questions for those who need help.

Best,

Phil Chrisman

[toddb76319869]

Hi Phil,

You say that you have used Security Analyzer with great success. I would love to hear more!

We are trying to leverage a licensed, remote CF 2016 Enterprise instance to run Security Analyzer, but have run into some issues (not the least of which is a paucity of documentation). I can connect to the remote server just fine - but, I cannot run the remote server's Security Analyzer.

Any insight you can provide on how to achieve this would be most appreciated.

Todd

[Charlie Arehart]

Todd, sorry I missed this here. Did you ever get your problem solved? There are a number of moving parts that could trip you up, from enablement of RDS in CF, its authentication, to firewalls (in either end), and so on.

I should put together a post on that, but until then feel free to elaborate, though I suppose that's going off topic for this post, so we should limit it to no more than a couple more. 

[Charlie Arehart]

Hi, Phil. So sorry that I somehow missed this until now. Good to hear of your experience. And yes, do put together that preso (or a bog post or video) if you have not already done it. And either way, feel free to link to it here. 

[carl type3]

Hi Charlie,

Got many sites on CF2016, not seeing issues.

There is a lot to like about CF2016. A couple things that come to mind are tomcat using NIO and Adobe CF support for Windows 2016.

Regards, Carl.

[Charlie Arehart]

Thanks, Phil and Carl, for confirming what I suspected, and that at least you guys are also not aware of any issues that should hold someone back. Again, not saying folks will have no issues, but any major ones seem either resolved or are documented (though again, perhaps for CF11 or 10, if you are skipping over those).

I guess the next step is for me to create a blog post, and hope that perhaps that may reach still more people, either to confirm or contend against my point here.