Thursday, 24 October 2013

So there won't be support for OSX 10.9 "Mavericks" on ColdFusion 10

G'day:
There's been a huge flurry of activity on the ColdFusion Bug tracker around ticket 3653076, entitled "Bad apache / tomcat connector for Mac OSX Mavericks 10.9". It was raised two days ago and has 20 votes already, and 13 comments.

And Richard Herbert has just done the decent thing and reminded us all that Adobe have already officially responded to this...




This just shows - yet again - how disconnected from their user base (and, I really feel "reality") that the ColdFusion team are. You can't not support the current versions of operating systems on your current versions of your software. I would actually expect both CF9 and CF10 to run fine on OSX 10.9. Because both of those versions are still within the "active" phase of their lifecycle. So I'm afraid, Adobe, there's a bit of a professional and ethical burden on you to support these things on current mainstream OSes. You charge a lot of money for this software, and this is just part of the cost of doing business.

This position is just terribly unprofessional of Adobe.

Some good news in all this is that the community has rallied here, and one of the dudes commenting against the ticket (Mike Nicholls: good on ya, mate) has fixed the problem. He made this comment:

Recompiling after making a small changed worked fine for me, Adobe do provide their version of the source:
http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/rhel-connector-configuration/_jcr_content/main-pars/download_1/file.res/connector-source.zip

I replaced this line in /native/common/jk_map.c:
strcpy(buf, rc);
with:
memmove(buf, rc, len + 1);

I'm not a C programmer so I can't guarantee I've introduced some horrible bug, but things have been working for me so far. Here's the copy I'm using if anybody else wanted to try:
https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=ACCA7C11400D15FA!618&authkey=!AOZJmH3HBrjvJ7s
He offers a sensible caveat, but if one wants to get going, one can. This is not a solution for anyone who actually needs "official support" on the OS (like for PCI compliance), but it'll be OK for general developers, I should think.

Adobe: if one of your community members who self-professedly is not an expert in the given field can possibly fix this in the space of 24h of the bug coming to light... how the hell is it you can legitimately feel you can take the position that "we won't be supporting that"?

Shoddy.  Just shoddy.

For people at CFSummit... can you please corner Rakshith (or his superiors if they're there), and find out what the hell they are thinking? Cheers.

--
Adam
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