Been putting this post off for a long time. Well, not exactly putting it off, but since all my hardware and backups were still in Pittsburgh, I didn’t have my blog up, so my hands were tied.

I downloaded CF8 and followed my typical procedures for deploying on JBoss. Everything worked fine. JBoss started up without any errors and I could hit my applications. Then I decided to see if I could still customize the deployment by moving the core ColdFusion files outside the deployment directory and that went without a hitch. I don’t know why, but I was concerned that they might take that option away.

All in all, nothing has changed as far as deployment procedures. I suppose the only change is that now Adobe will answer your phone call if you deploy on JBoss!

Now for upgrading.

The most obvious change is in the web.xml file that comes with ColdFusion. All of the parameter id’s have changed names from macromedia_xxx to coldfusion_xxx.

<context-param id="coldfusion_context_2">
        <param-name>coldfusion.compiler.outputDir</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/cfclasses</param-value>
        <description>This is the directory where we will place compiled
            pages. It must be relative to the webapp root.</description>
</context-param>

Therefore, if you have added anything in your web.xml – security, custom servlets, etc. – it’s best that you copy your custom definitions to the default ColdFusion web.xml rather than trying to update yours to match all the new names.

As always, ColdFusion does not come with a jboss-web.xml file, so make sure that you have that in place for each application again.