ColdFusion 8 - What's your upgrade experience been like?

Now that ColdFusion 8 is out...

For those of you who have already upgraded your production environments of CF 6.1 and/or CF 7 environments over to ColdFusion 8, or are in the process of doing so, what has the experience been like?

Have you had to make any code changes? What kind of performance gains have you received from the change? Was it as painless as they say? Or, did/have you had to make a lot of changes? How long of an effort?

How big is your site? How much traffic? Did you have any parts of your site that were concerns? What about integration points, like other non-database systems CF talks to, middleware, etc?

I'd like to hear from non-Adobe employees here, to get a somewhat impartial view. I am especially interested in hearing from developers supporting or developing enterprise-class applications.

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Comments
Painless - all code (based on CF7 though) worked fine.

Mind you Adobe.com has been running on CF8 builds for months without any issues.
# Posted By Peter Tilbrook | 8/2/07 9:09 AM
Smooth and easy. Transferring old settings without any problem was awesome. :)

http://tinyurl.com/2gsa68
# Posted By Ouz Demirkap1 | 8/2/07 9:19 AM
@Peter: I know all about adobe.com... but I'd like to hear from other companies. The realist in me wants to hear some real experiences from the trenches, from a non-biased viewpoint.
# Posted By Brian Meloche | 8/2/07 9:57 AM
@Oguz (sorry if the characters didn't come across) - Thanks.

I would like to hear from more developers that have made or are making the upgrade on enterprise-level applications. I think a blog's a little too lightweight to be useful for me in this case.
# Posted By Brian Meloche | 8/2/07 10:02 AM
I'm unable to upgrade because Adobe tell me they don't have any license keys available yet for subscription customers. They said they will email me when they have some. It's been 2 days now. Great customer service as per usual. :-(
# Posted By Gary Fenton | 8/2/07 12:36 PM
I upgraded my development server from CFMX 7 to CF 8 during the beta cycle. The transition was very smooth with no issues and to date. All of my code has worked unchanged.
# Posted By Rey Bango | 8/2/07 5:48 PM
Upgraded my development Windows XP machine from CF7 to CF8 without any problems.

I disabled all the CF7 services first (I did not uninstall), then simply ran the CF8 installer which migrated existing DSNs etc.

Everything works perfectly
# Posted By Johan | 8/2/07 6:32 PM
Brian,

We have begun the process of upgrading all of our test servers in an effort to support CF 8 for our next release of CommonSpot which is coming out in about 8 weeks. We will have more information but one thing to remember here is that for those applications which you have compiled Java applications for you should probably recompile them if you are planning on using the 1.6 JVM. Although the team at Adobe states that the speed increase is from the work they did it is clear that the 1.6 JVM will make a bigger difference. I will post more when we finish our first couple rounds of QA. Although, I will say that I have been demoing our new product release on CF8 beta for over a month and a half. Very impressed!
# Posted By Ron West | 8/2/07 6:59 PM
we did the upgrade per a request from a client. the problem (once again) was the same story as 6-7 upgrade where it didn't really "upgrade" cf7, it didn't remove old services and in this case it didn't even install the ODBC services on 8. i'm sure it would work just fine if it were just a clean install, but the upgrade process hasn't seemed to work in some years.
# Posted By David | 8/10/07 6:54 AM
I am in the process of upgrading our test box and have run into the same problem as some others; the ODBC Agent and Server services show up in the Services but won't run because they were
not installed during the upgrade from 7 to 8. Not sure how to get them installed either...any ideas?
# Posted By Jim | 8/15/07 12:54 PM
We have not upgraded yet, but I remember when upgrading from 6 to 7
we had a problem with the ODBC services too. I finally figured out I needed
to change ColdFusion back to run as System during the install/upgrade
instead of the user I had it running as. Hope this helps. If it does, please
let me know as I'll be upgrading several soon.
# Posted By Brian | 8/16/07 12:02 AM
My upgrade experience was overall very smooth and without any hiccups except for some issues with the report builder and a flash file upload custom tag that I was using.

Report Builder: Some of the fonts I was using ont the reports e.g. Helvetica are no longer available. Also when I opened an existing report the fonts for some of the fields changed by themselves
and became smaller. When I tried fixing them the report builder would not accept the changes.

Flash File upload tag: I was using a flash file upload custom tag made by people at asfusion (http://www.asfusion.com/blog/entry/file-upload-wit...)
The 'Choose File' feature no longer works. The window that used to pop up to allow the user to select a file is no longer available. For me this is a big annoyance as I don't know of any other
way to upload files using the flash interface. It would have been nice if Adobe had just added a file upload functionality to the flash forms which in my estimation is not asking a great deal.
I am looking for a solution to fix this. So if anyone knows of any workarounds then pleassssssseee do let me know.
Thank you.
# Posted By harkirat | 8/19/07 11:20 AM
We are having trouble with the licensing on our linux server. We purchased an upgrade (from cf6 standard). We have another instance (cf7 enterprise) running on the same server. Without prompting the cf8 migration tool runs (even though we selected a new install) and ports over everything from cf7. Then in the licensing area It seems to accept the cf8 serial number but when we put in the upgrade serial I get the message

"This combination of license keys does not constitute a valid upgrade."

Adobe's "suggested solution" was to refund the upgrade price so that we could purchase the full version. Is anyone else having this problem?
# Posted By Jen | 8/24/07 1:16 PM
Dear all,

I am upgrading from 7.0.2 to 8 and now still testing my application. My application is using <cfform format="flash">. I hope I won't hit the 32K problem in v8. So far I have encountered 6 issues:

(1) I have found a small issue with <cfreportparam>. In v7, I managed to pass a blank value for the tag's name, but in v8 they force you to enter a name for the tag.

In v7 is ok, but not in v8.

<cfset strName = "">
<cfreportparam name="#strName#">

(2) There is no much improvement in Report Builder. In v8, I have to re-adjust left-margin for all my reports. I don't know why, but all i know it's time consuming.

(3) Still in Report Builder. If you have sub-report, try to modify your main report. The Report Builder will automatically double sub-report Parameters. If you have 2 parameters, then it will add another 2 .. so you'll have 4.

(4) Still in Report Builder. Be careful if you use image object. In v8, the default background of the image is gray. So you need to make it transparent manually, otherwise you'll have a gray-colored background for your image.

(5) Still in Report Builder. Same Font problem as harkirat, I guess. But I don't have problem with the flash file upload.

(6) Still in Report Builder. In the v7, you won't encountered a problem when you have an Input Parameter with this setting:


Name: MyInputParameter
Default Label Text:
Data Type: String
Default Value: Test

In v8, you need to add double-quote-sign for your Default Value.

Name: MyInputParameter
Default Label Text:
Data Type: String
Default Value: "Test"

Those I have found so far.

Cheers,
Keiko
# Posted By Keiko | 10/1/07 2:17 AM
Upgraded from CF7 to CF8 without a problem. But we are having an issue with the performance. The applications running on the CF 8 server are slower than the same applications running on CF 7 (same HW/SW).
The blog entry below shows the exact issue we are having. Does any one know what may be causing this.
The server is not consuming much memory (194 MB out of max heap 512 MB, MaxPermGen = 192m).
Any ideas out there?
# Posted By Ahmed | 11/7/07 1:58 PM
Forgot to paste the link to the blog entry http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/thread...:53419
# Posted By Ahmed | 11/7/07 2:00 PM
# Posted By Ahmed | 11/7/07 2:03 PM
@Jim To fix the issue where the ODBC Agent/Server don't seem to be running, you will have to reinstall with the "Documentation" option selected. We had the same issue and the reinstall fixed it.

Over all our upgrade experience has been smooth. Mostly all of our issues have been related to our upgrade to SQL Server 2005 on a different machine.
# Posted By Jon | 1/3/08 9:15 AM
Same issue here with the ODBC services. What the heck? If you don't install the *documentation* you don't get the ODBC services? How random is that!?
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