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Discussion on: Yes, ColdFusion is "Unpopular". No, I don't care.

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Charlie Arehart

CF11 was from 2014. If you were working with it "not long ago", it was already dated by then, surpassed by 2016 and 2018, which run on Java 11. Hardly dated.

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Rad Gruchalski • Edited

If only the client wanted to upgrade their 4 instances on every of 4 production servers. Sigh. Do you think that everybody upgrades?

Edit: which reminds me, "not so long ago" was in 2017. I guess the only option was CF2016. Happy to see the dependencies are somewhat upgraded since CF11. However, looking at slf4j used by CF2018, the version is 1.7.12, it was released in March 2015. log4j is 1.2.15, released in August 2007. I'm sure these dependencies work fine and they're stable but the legacy apis in such old versions make it rally difficult to integrate CF with recent, widely used technologies. Partially because of CF being such a monolith.

The fact that it runs on Java 11 means nothing. Java does pretty well with regards to backwards compatibility.

If CF had a little bit more modular approach, maybe that would turn things around. There are some great aspects of CF. I really enjoyed working with cfpdf, for example.

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Charlie Arehart

FWIW, 2 yrs on, CF2021 did indeed introduce that more "modular approach" you wished for here. The core is around 140m (vs the old 1gb min you mentioned in a previous comment), and one can optionally install modules to support more and more functionality--whether in the installer, via the cmd line, via scripting, via docker config loading, or via the CF admin.

Just one of many ways CF continues to evolve. Too late for some, but just in time for others, who for various reasons are not only sticking with it but moving to more recent versions for various reasons.