How hard will it be to upgrade a ColdFusion application from 5.0 to 8.0?

Question

I have a Windows 2000 server running ColdFusion 5.0 and one rather large legacy application. The original developer has long since come and gone.

The server needs to be retired, and none of the ColdFusion media can be found. The course of action will be too purchase ColdFusion 8 and use that (Unless anyone has a suggestion on an alternative).

Can anybody comment as to how much backwards incompatibility exists between ColdFusion 5.0 and 8.0? Will I be able to just copy and run the website or will I need to trawl through the code changing syntax or references?

Answer 1

I'm not exactly sure on the amount of backwards compatibility, but you should download the developer edition and give it a test run plus its free since its only for development.

ColdFusion Developer

Answer 2

You shouldn't have any problems (insert standard disclaimers here . . . ) ColdFusion has always been excellent about maintaining backwards compatibility.

The only thing I know that has been dropped, and I think it was version 5 when it was dropped was doing

<cfset x = QueryNew()>
<cfif x>

has been depricated. So you might have to do some code trawling.

Answer 3

Within the ColdFusion Administrator is a Code Analyzer for help with situations like this.

1. Download the (Free) ColdFusion 8 Developer Edition
2. Open up the Administrator and go to Debugging & Logging > Code Analyzer
3. Run your code through that and it should identify any problems.

Answer 4

Another thing that may not be picked up by the Code Analyzer, and may or may not be an issue, is nesting of cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="True" or "False". It was a while ago, but I remember some crazy output issues with where those were set and where it was turned off. The behavior of that setting with includes changed in that upgrade from 5, IIRC.