One of the biggest improvements to ColdFusion was it becoming a JVM language. However, that move seems to be creating a lot of confusion. Charlie Arehart has written a ton about Oracle's announcement. As have many other big voices in the CF community.
Earlier today, Adobe announced that they've somewhat come to a resolution for ColdFusion and using Oracle Java. And a big Thank You to Rakshith and the rest of the team for following up with this.
Apparently Java SE 8 and 11 will be supported for Adobe ColdFusion without having to fork over some extra bucks to Oracle. And Adobe is updating both CF2016 and CF2018 to use Java 11 by some time in February 2019. And they seem to be sticking by Oracle.
That does seem to leave CF11 and lower users in a bit of a spot, but I'll be honest. If you're still running ColdFusion 11, you may have more issues than what JVM version you're running. It's probably time to look at some kind of upgrade. I know that ACF can be relatively expensive, but I truly don't understand the belief that CFMX is still a viable system. It may work like it did when written, but
- it was released almost 15 years ago,
- there are easily demonstrated Metasploit attacks against it and
- let's not even talk about the OS that it's probably running on. It might be time to move into more modern web development and quit contributing to the belief that CFML is "legacy".
All in all, it may not be a bad idea to move over to Amazon Coretto or OpenJVM or some other non-Oracle JVM. Considering that ColdFusion is pretty tightly coupled with the JVM, I think some sort of JVM will still be pretty necessary for quite a while. I'm not sure of the best option, but I think this definitely put a ginormous plus in the column of switching to a non-Oracle JVM.
I'm not currently managing any CF Servers, but it's probably still time for some intense Google-Fu.
