Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

After April 30, 2019, Adobe will no longer provide any updates for CF11, so there will be no security patches or hot fixes for CF 11 after that. Of course, updates for CF2016 will indeed continue into Feb 2021, while CF2018 updates will continue into July 2023. And we could expect CF2020 (when it comes) to by supported into 2025.

How do I know this? Where does Adobe say it? And can one buy support (yes) to "buy extra time to get such CF11 updates beyond April" (no)? And what about CF11 support for Java 11 (no)? Finally, could you use help in moving off CF11 to CF 2016 or 2018? For more on each of these, read on.

(Update: I should note that Adobe did indeed offer one more update beyond April 2019, in June, when they updated CF2018 and 2016 as well for an important security update. That was a bonus. They have said there really will be no more CF11 updates, as per the original plan.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

But here's some good news: Amazon has recently released a new free JVM (java virtual machine) implementation based on the OpenJDK specification, called Corretto. In this post, I want to share some news about it. (Off the bat, let me tell my friends on any Linux flavor other than Amazon Linux 2, this is not yet available to you. For now it is only available for Amazon Linux 2 as well as Windows, MacOS, and as a docker image. Other Linux flavors are due in Q1 2019.)

For much more, read on.

Update in Jan 2019: This is no longer an option for CF folks to consider, as Adobe announced both that they have licensed Oracle Java for production use by those using CF, and they clarified that they will NOT be adding support for any OpenJDK implementations. I will leave this post and the rest, for non-CF users and for posterity.

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

• Regarding Java 8, did you know that Oracle will no longer offer free updates/security patches for Java 8, if used for production (NOT just "commercial") purposes beyond Jan 2019? After that, you must pay them for support/updates (including security updates). For more on why this is NOT just about "commercial" use, see below.)
• Regarding Java 11, the next major release, did you know that the Oracle Java 11 JVM cannot be USED at ALL for PRODUCTION purposes, without paying for it?
• Finally, while Oracle will be offering a free openJDK implementation (which CAN be used for production, for free), did you know they will only be committing to supporting/updating their Oracle Java 11 openjdk for 6 months after release, leaving subsequent updates to the community of contributors?

For more, including why this may have significant impact on your use of Java-based applications, as well as alternatives that may exist for you going forward, read on.

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

or to get the md5, just add that as an argument:

The tool is built into Windows 7 and above, and Server 2008 and above (at least). Tools like it are included in other OS's, but I'm sharing the above for Windows users.

Regardless of what OS you use, for more on why knowing the checksum can be useful (and why comparing file sizes instead may not be enough), and especially with regard to some interesting info about installers for CF2016 and CF11, do read on.

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In this post, I want to encourage you to update as well as show you how to do it, whether you have implemented FR using the automated installer, the manual install process (drop in the jar), or are running it within Commandbox. (I also address a mistake you could make when using the automated installer that would leave you NOT completely updated because you missed a step.) But notice that most of the bullet points are about OTHER than actually DOING the update. If that's your focus, jump to that section.

Update: Just a few months after I offered this post, version 8.1 was released (in Jan 2019), and it offers now a notification in the top banner when there is an update, which is nice (but obviates only a couple of points I make below. The rest should apply well into future FR releases.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

TLDR (and update since initial post):
If you can add ::1 to the list of debugging IP addresses in the CF Admin, that should solve this problem. If you cannot, that problem was fixed a few months after I wrote this, in CF2018 update 2 and CF2016 update 8, released in Feb 2019 (and it's no longer a problem on CF2021 and above, of course). For those not yet running those, if you find that adding ::1 just turns into 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1, read on.

For more on the matter, including why it happened, solving it, etc., read on.

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In that first part, I had covered these topics:

• Resources for finding what's new
• So what are the new features in CF2018?
• ColdFusion Performance Monitoring Toolset (PMT)

In this part, I will continue with these topics:

• Finding still more about what's new in CF2018 (bugs fixed, known issues, whitepapers, deprecated features, more info on new features)
• Other info and resources on CF2018, like pricing, upgrades, licensing, trials, support timeframes
• What about CFBuilder and the API Manager?

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In particular, I want to highlight a new way (which you may have missed) where Adobe has been sharing info about the new release as a series of blog entries about each feature from CF team members. Some of these have examples (which have been missing sometimes in the past with discussions of new features). That said, and helpful though those are, there's not a single post linking to them all, so I'm offering that here in effect. There are also doc pages about each new feature, and I link to those also.

And there is still more info about the new release which is NOT covered in those blog posts (including pricing, upgrades, licensing, etc.), and I want to add those here.

Some may remember that I had done a series of posts back when CF2016 came out, and I'm condensing what I covered in a couple of those into this one. Hope it's helpful (and I will update it as I learn new information).

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Note: This blog post is from 2018. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

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