While working recently with a client who has Entreprise DevNet licenses for their development team, I was maddeningly boggled by the Javascript error messages I was seeing being thrown on some new dynamically generated Javascipt code. The error was always on line 1 and dropping into a JS debugger showed nothing. Then after the 50th time of this happening, I noticed it… the Macromedia watermark META tag at the top of the page.

After some quick searching, I found a post on Stephen Erat’s blog regarding this issue. Some of the comments showed me how to get around this. Quite simple.

Additional note: This is not intended for people to use this technique to violate the terms of your license agreement with Macromedia by placing DevNet servers into a production environment. This is simply for those who are running the DevNet version for development purposes only and having problems with the watermark.

1. Uncompress cfusion.ear and/or cfusion.war
2. Expand the resultant WEB-INF\cfusion\lib directory and find cfusion.jar file
3. Uncompress cfusion.jar to some temporary directory
4. Look in the resulting file coldfusion\runtime\resource.properties
5. Eliminate the watermark text on line 8
6. Recompress the directories into a new cfusion.jar and copy over the old one

Obviously the watermark was put in place by Macromedia to protect their DevNet licenses from being abused by unscrupulous merchants who would use them in production. However, it is an inadequate safety precaution that ends up causing more problems than it should.