Moving From Tag-Based Spaghetti CFM to a ColdBox MVC Application: A Real Migration Story

You don’t rewrite a legacy tag-based ColdFusion application from scratch — you migrate it incrementally, and ColdBox is built to let you do exactly that without breaking existing URLs on day one. The proven path uses ColdBox’s Implicit View Dispatch: drop your old .cfm files into ColdBox's /views folder, and ColdBox auto-creates the events/routes from the folder structure, so views/about/contactUs.cfm is instantly reachable at /about/contactUs — no handlers, no layouts, no routes, and all your old URLs keep working. The app is now running inside ColdBox while still procedural. From there you refactor gradually — extract a shared layout, pull business logic out of the .cfm files into model/service CFCs (wired with WireBox dependency injection), build real handlers (controllers), and add routes — one screen at a time, at whatever pace is safe. This is the Strangler Fig pattern: the new MVC structure grows around the legacy code until the legacy code is gone, with both coexisting throughout so you never do a risky "big bang" rewrite. This is a real, documented migration approach, with the sequence, the code, and the pitfalls to avoid.
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