Thursday 17 July 2014

My position on running ColdFusion 11.0.0 in production

G'day:
I've seen a few people claim they're about to go into production with ColdFusion 11. My reaction to that is "are you a lunatic" (note lack of question mark).

ColdFusion 11 was released in a rushed, premature fashion. It was poorly tested, and there are currently 148 bugs raised for it. 30 of those bugs are marked as fixed, but that does not mean they're fixed in the released version. I just had a quick squizz, and a decent chunk of them are marked as fixed for a build number that is after the release version.

148 is a lot of bugs for a version 11 product, within a coupla months of its release. Also bear in mind that those are only the ones people have found and taken the time to raise. It seems I've found 38 bugs, and I haven't even actively tested it; this is just stuff I have found whilst trying to use it (for my blog articles). Granted I will raise every single glitch I find, but still... one does not have to look hard to find bugs.

Will every single one of these bugs impact you? No. Even the majority? No. But I think this is testament to poor quality work, which needs a patch or two to get it in working order. I don't necessarily blame the Adobe devs for this (some: yes; all: no), I blame the overly-hasty release. To me, CF11 is to CF10 what CFMX6.0 was to CF5. If that doesn't mean anything to you, bear in mind that CFMX6.0 was the first version of CFML that was written in Java, not written in C++ (?). It was a huge undertaking, was a great idea, but was not usable until 6.1. Note that's 6.1, not 6.0.1.

My professional opinion is that if you're thinking of going into production with ColdFusion 11, you need to spend a lot of time lab-testing (and load-testing) your app and ColdFusion before going live. If that works OK: all good (and, hey, it could well be all good!).

But don't just upgrade and go live with CF11 because it's shiny and new. It's shiny cos the paint's still wet.

--
Adam