Note: This blog post is from 2021. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

For most, you should read on, especially about an important change regarding TLS support (and calling out to servers not yet running TLS 1.2 or above). I cover that and other important topics:

• What's in the JVM update, do you need to update to it?
• A key change in this Java update: calls out to TLS 1.1 or 1.0 no longer allowed, by default
• Re-enabling support for calling out to old TLS versions
• Groundhog day: you'll need do make this java.security file change on any later JVM updates
• Should you update to the new JVM version?
• The importance of testing such updates/changes
• More questions you may surely have, and finding answers to them
• Obtaining the updated Java installers

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Note: This blog post is from 2021. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Some good news is that ColdFusion offers simple ways/variables that can show you each of these, via the admin or via CFML code. In this post, I discuss both approaches, including a simple single variable which works in CF2018 and above, a variation for those on CF2016 and earlier, as well as variations for Lucee.

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Note: This blog post is from 2021. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Of course I wish Rakshith all the best. He guided the release of CF2021, which many think is one of the best new CF releases in that timeframe, and he will be missed. But time marches on, as does CF.

In this post, I reminisce first about who the past (surprisingly few) CF Product Managers were, and then I muse about what the next CF PM will face, and what all this means for CF going forward.

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Note: This blog post is from 2021. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 offer a rundown of what seem the most significant libraries and their versions, as deployed in the first release of ColdFusion (2021 Release).

[Update: I have started updating this post to identify the versions as of update 4, released in May 2022. Rather than wait until I have found ALL the new values, I will just update the list below, clarifying when I have noted the updated value.]

This is something I have been doing in my "hidden gems" talks for the past several releases. I also explain here how I find these version numbers, which isn't always obvious, in case that may help anyone (and also because some libraries may change with future updates to CF2021). I also offer some commentary on why this matter of library versions is important to some, as well as some counterpoints to the demands some have that every library should always be the absolute latest version (and why that's just not practicable).

If you just want the version numbers without the "waffle", look for the bulleted list of them below. :-)

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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.

Do you have a modern Asus laptop with the NumberPad (orNumPad) feature (a virtual numeric keypad embedded within the touchpad, picture below)? You may know there's a button to enable/disable it on demand, but do you find find it coming on when you brush that by mistake? Are you annoyed by that behavior, and all the more that you can't find how to "permanently" disable it?

In this post, I discuss ways to try to permanently disable it. (Indeed, I discuss many ways I have found or that have been shared here as the post evolved over the years.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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 you can change your CFML code to get around the problem, as I also discuss below.

[Update: As of Mar 2021, Adobe now offers implements this "hotfix" into CF2021 Update 1 (and above). You DO still need to add the JVM arg discussed, if you want to revert the behavior:

It's just that yo uno longer need to obtain and implement the specialhotfix jar file I'd announced with this post. Again the update does NOT change the DEFAULT behavior, which is why that JVM arg is still necessary. The rest of the information below applies.]

Read on for additional details.

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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 discuss the problem, as well as two solutions you can choose between: a) finding and changing the incompatible code, or (new since Dec 2020) b) implementing a new JVM arg that Adobe offered to revert this behavior back to how things worked before CF2021. You must do one or the other of these things, if you are affected by this issue. The update does not REVERT the behavior.

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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.

The recent release of CF2021 is a great sign for the continued vitality of CF, but this looming deadline is a reminder that as the years roll on, we not only get new versions but we say good-bye to old ones.

Wondering what you can do? or when CF2018 or CF2021 support ends? And what's the difference between "core" and paid Adobe support plans? For more on these, as well as official Adobe documentation that discusses such things, read on.

[Update: CF2016 users got a "reprieve" of sorts, when Adobe released updates to CF2021 and 2018 in March 2021, and they also offered the final update to CF2016, update 17, especially because it address a security vulnerability. Sadly, some of the changes in the update--not related to the security fix--were "breaking" changes. For more on that update, see the Adobe blog post from March 2021.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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.

As with each CF release, there are features great and small--ones that may "sell" it, and ones that may simply make your life easier.

This is a follow-up to my post from last month, Getting started with "Project Stratus" public beta, aka CF2021. In that I highlighted some key info one would need to get started USING the prerelease, which came out in August, but I only briefly mentioned then some of the key new features. (I also explained why I had referred even then to it being CF2021, given info I'd found in the prerelease.)

In this post, I want to highlight more clearly what those new features are, nearly 60 of them in several categories!--just with a brief mention of the feature and perhaps its sub-features--and most important with a pointer to where to find them discussed in far more detail.

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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.

• release notes for java 11.0.9
• release notes for java 8.0_271

For some, that's all they need to hear.

And I could (and probably should) leave it at that. But there are other questions which folks will have, including more on getting those binaries/installers (from Oracle or Adobe), on the difference between those LTS versions and "more recent" Java versions, as well as non-Oracle JVMs, and on licensing matters and more. For those, read on. Perhaps I will split this other stuff out into its own post at some point, so I can just point to it from news of these Java updates.

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