Friday 1 March 2013

Adobe: I told you so

G'day
Last year, it was announced that Java 6 was being EOLed in November (it may have been announced before last year, but that's when I heard about it). At this time Adobe had promised a patch to CF9 & 10 to be supported on Java 7 before the end of November.

In September last year, Oracle pushed the EOL date out to yesterday. Rather annoyingly, Adobe decided to push the Java 7 patch out to "before the EOL date".


At this time, I said this:
Well I hope it's closer to Nov than Feb, to be honest.  It's one thing for Adobe to get there just under the wire with ColdFusion, but please bear in mind all of use need lab time for our server upgrade testing too.  So having a coupla months leeway would be rather handy.  If Adobe are targeting Nov, then that's cool.

That's not very prophetic (it's stating the bleeding obvious, really).

Why do I mention this? Well Adobe didn't allow their clients any time to test this patch of theirs, and the first person I hear who's done the upgrade has had their app faceplant (I will not provide details until I get their permission).

Update
I've got permission to cross-reference the issue, which is this thread on the Adobe forums, which cross-references issue 3508592 on the bug tracker. It's one of the weirdest bugs I have ever seen (and this is saying something, as I seem to have a nose for bugs), so is worth reading about. The good news is that Piyush Nayak from Adobe has said they can replicate it, and they're working on a fix. This is a great response from Adobe, I think. Cheers (on behalf of Tom).

cont'ed...

So they are faced with these options:
  • run with a no-longer-supported JVM;
  • rewrite not-insignificant chunks of their app.
And they weren't given the opportunity to find this out until, basically, after it was too late.

So... "I told you so", Adobe. And thanks for that. You really have to give some more thought to your clients in future, I think.

:-|

--
Adam