Hello All!

I am the new moderator of r/coldfusion subreddit. The previous moderator was too busy, and had moved on, so they had restricted posting and the subreddit was dying. I was trying to post, but could not, so I asked if I could take over the moderation...and here we are. This subreddit is now open for posting!

I have been a CF developer for 28 years. Honestly, it has been a great 28 years. I have been able to create so many fabulous things with CF, and it has taken me on a very good career- how many people are able to use the same language for 28 years?!?!? I will be retiring in 2 years, and sadly CF will be retiring with me at my organization. Our top level IT Director has never liked CF and he has been trying to replace it for many years. He wanted us to go to PHP. Then Visual Basic. Then Ruby. Then VB.Net. Now C# on .Net. Amazingly, CF has been running along just fine as all of the other languages of the day have come and gone. But with my retirement coming up, it's time to transfer to the preferred language of my replacement - C#.

As we have been working on the transition, the new programmer and I keep talking about the different languages, and how we do things. I have learned a lot from him- new techniques that have some new modern names, but after he explains them to me I usually say, "Oh, I can do that, I just call it something different." He has been very impressed with how quickly and easily I can get things done (I've been doing this for 28 years, I better be fast!) while I have learned about different points of security and optimization. The other programmer has been impressed that code I wrote 20 years ago is still humming along in production. That is what CF is about- a stable platform to create excellent business applications.

I have always stayed on the business and operations side of things, rather than IT. My focus has been on meeting the needs of the users, rather than going on IT circle-jerks. I think I hit a very good point in technology where I was able to teach myself a language and start building useful applications- and that just kept rolling on year after year. I don't think that opportunity exists anymore.

I hope people use this subreddit for discussion, questions, etc. I will be here for another 2 years and I'm interested in hearing what people have to say. I've never moderated on reddit before, so forgive me if there are bumps along the way. But I've been in the CF community for a long time, and I know that there are some really good people out there. I'm hoping to give them a chance to post again.

Thanks!

We have been developing ColdFusion applications for over 20 years and I cannot believe what I am seeing with the Adobe ColdFusion 2021 pricing.

We have a client that we have been developing and maintaining an application for since the year 2000, one of oldest clients. Recently they sold the one divisions that uses the application to another company. So, they are going through the process of separating the parts of the business and moving the applications and network to the new entity.

The new company have decided to move all the infrastructure from inhouse hosted systems to a Microsoft Azure hosted system. It is 2022, so they may as well host everything in the Cloud, makes senses and what better time to do it then we you have to set up all the systems. The current application is used by approximately 100 employees and is used inhouse only. The current system runs on Adobe ColdFusion Server 2016 Standard Edition with a Microsoft SQL Server back end. It isn’t a very complex system but does integrate with some other applications. This will be the 4th or 5th version of ColdFusion used for the system, so it averages an upgrade every 4 or 5 years.

The new setup was to have a Production Server and a Staging Server, both of which where private Azure VM server are only accessible by employees that have access to the Azure AD this is not a system that has any public access.

So, we reviewed the Adobe ColdFusion 2021 EULA (https://www.adobe.com/go/cf2021_eula). Specifically looking for information regarding the Staging Server License. Section 1.8 says staging server uses license in respect to the production software.

• “Development Software” means Software licensed solely for (a) internal development and testing; and (b) for use on a Staging Server, when Licensee is using the Software with respect to a valid license to the Production Software. In each case the Development Software may only be accessed by Authorized Users over the Licensee’s Internal Network.

The virtual machine was to be setup as 4 core server as there was other applications required to run on the server. And since ColdFusion 2021 Standard edition requires a license for every 2 cores, we would require 2 ColdFusion 2021 Standard licenses to run the application. The client was okay with this. So, two US$2,499.00 per full license, is US$5000. The client proceeded to contact Adobe about organising to purchase the software.

Adobe came back and said that ColdFusion 2021 Standard Edition cannot be installed in the Cloud. Even though they product page (https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-standard.html) gives the appearance that it can. The first section is even titled “Take your applications to the cloud”. They specifically stated that Standard Edition could not be installed on Azure and AWS. We went back and looked at the EULA again and the words “Cloud”, “Azure” and “AWS” are never even mentioned in the document.

We searched the web and could not find any mention about not being allowed on Azure. Okay so, they would have to move ColdFusion 2021 Enterprise Edition. But since Enterprise Edition is for up to 8 cores. They would only need a single license at US$9,499.00 per full license. Not ideal, nearly twice what was budgeted for, but that could be done. So some more back and forwards with Adobe only to find out that the normal Enterprise Edition License that you can buy from the website also cannot be installed in the cloud. More searching the web finds a single line in the ColdFusion FAQ (https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/enterprise/faq.html) under the Pricing, editions, and upgrading section.

• Adobe ColdFusion (2021 release) is sold in two editions: Standard Edition costs US$2,499 per two cores, and Enterprise Edition costs US$9,499 per eight cores. ColdFusion can also be used for development at no cost with the complimentary Developer Edition, a full-featured server for development use only.
  You may also purchase ColdFusion Enterprise Edition on a per virtual core metric to deploy ColdFusion on the cloud or VMs. Reach out to [email protected] for more details

So apparently there is a third pricing model called “per virtual core metric”. They came back with a price in the US$14,000 ball park for 4 cores, approximately $3,500 per core. And on top of that it is per year, so every year they keep the system running, will cost an additional US$14,000. I am sure they will increase that every year with some sort of review. Lets say the system goes another 4 years before a server and software upgrade without a price increase, that will be US$56,000 for the US$9,500 enterprise product with half the cores. All because a company doesn’t want to host a server in house.

Everyone is just shaking their heads. Once again, we reviewed the EULA, there is a lot of mention of Internal Network but most of it relates to Development or Staging Software. I have to wonder how many people are in breach of the Adobe ColdFusion license with regards to running it on VM’s outside their network (e.g in the “Cloud”) and having a normal license either standard or enterprise when they are supposed to be paying this “per virtual core metric” license.

We have started the move to implementing Lucee, which has most of the application running with minor changes. And a couple of hurdles to solve for the parts that Lucee doesn’t support, but can be solved with different approaches. Safe to say that we will be looking to ensure that all other clients system are Lucee compatible before any other software upgrades are need or they want to move to the Cloud.

I thought I would put this out there as I have not seen anything on the web with regards to this pricing model or other peoples experience with it. I am sure that a lot of people will think just buy the enterprise version off the website and install it. But after going through the EULA enough times now, Section 12 no doubt come back to bite them if they tried.

• Adobe may, at its expense and no more than once every twelve (12) months, appoint an independent third party or Adobe’s internal auditor to verify the usage and number of copies and installations of the Software in use by Licensee.

Would like to hear if this is a well know thing with ColdFusion cloud pricing? It was bad enough they want one and a half times as much for half the cores, but to want it ever 12 months. I really don’t know how small to medium business will be able to afford to use the product any more, with more and more services moving to cloud based.

Clear Capital is looking to add a new full time ColdFusion engineer! We're looking for someone who knows CF and has kept up with modern versions and engineering practices. Ideal candidates will also have experience with AWS offerings and at least started dabbling with AI tooling. Check out the job posting here for more info:

https://clearcapitaljobs.multiscreensite.com/career-description/b3a99fa9-a27f-487a-95c1-37f551396990

Feel free to chat me with any questions and if you do apply let me know and I'll keep an eye out so you at least make it past the filters.

I just want to give this statement for the benefit of those who are thinking to learn ColdFusion.

After 4 years of copy and pasting PHP code for WordPress work, I was nowhere skilled enough to call myself knowledgeable in PHP. I was turned off by the many preliminaries you have to do just to have a working PHP app.

I was working with NodeJS when I was advised to familiarize myself with ColdFusion for a potential job in the coming months.

After three weeks with learncfinaweek.com, reading the adobe documentation and playing around, I can say that I never felt this happy and satisfied learning a programming language before.

Here are the things that beginners will appreciate with CF

-If you have html/css/javascript background, you'll easily pick up CFML.

-You can focus on working on your application logic right away rather than spend time getting everything up and running first.

-I friggin love cfquery! (If you have experience with SQL, you can do a lot with this tag)

I've built 2 working simple apps using cfml, javascript and bootstrap so far and I'm hoping to have this publicly available soon. I'm just trying to get them to work with railo at present. (I totally didn't see that cfformgroup was not supported).

Anyway, I'm also trying to get the hang of cf components and exploring FW/1 and CfWheels... (I looked up coldbox but my whitebelt level knowledge leaves me intimidated at the moment)

So for those beginners wondering whether to learn ColdFusion or not, just give it a chance. Invest an hour or two on it for a week and you'll get motivated to learn more.

Also, I'd like to mention that the community is quite nice and welcoming wherever I went. (stackexchange, adobe forums, railo, comment sections on cf blogs) You just don't feel shy/afraid to ask.

I just don't understand why there's a lot of hate for this from devs who don't us CF. This was one of the reasons why I didn't think of checking out coldfusion a few years ago.

I don't say that CF is easy to learn. It's just easier to learn compared to PHP and Javascript especially for those who are taking up programming for the first time.

Here is Charlie Arehart's presentation showing us what we will face in making the move to CF-2025.  In the session, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will combine and condense his two recent CF Summit talks, "Hidden Gems in CF2025" and "Migrating apps to ColdFusion 2025 from earlier versions".

Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOBs7RBc4Fw

Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group meets in East Lansing, Michigan. The group's website is at http://www.mmcfug.org

Find our channel at     https://youtube.com /u/cfml

Posting this as a heads-up for anyone running internet facing ColdFusion.

Adobe patched CVE-2026-48282 in APSB26-68 on June 30. It’s a path traversal issue in ColdFusion 2025 Update 9 / 2023 Update 20 and earlier, rated CVSS 10.0, and Adobe’s fix is ColdFusion 2025 Update 10 / 2023 Update 21.

Adobe advisory:
https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/coldfusion/apsb26-68.html

NVD:
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-48282

The reason I’m posting is that after public technical details were released, we saw exploitation activity hit our honeypot telemetry. So this may be worth treating as more than “just another critical ColdFusion patch”.

I’d suggest checking:

• Any public ColdFusion Admin / CFIDE exposure

• Whether you’re on 2025 Update 10 or 2023 Update 21

• Web logs around July 2 onward for suspicious traversal / file-write style requests

• Any WAF rules or temporary controls while patching is being rolled out

I wrote up the observed exploitation timeline here for anyone tracking it:
https://kevintel.com/CVE-2026-48282

Not trying to spam the sub, just seemed relevant given how often ColdFusion bugs move quickly once technical details are public.

Original post: http://redd.it/1pobk5

So I'm nearing the end of building my first CF site, and over the past few days I've been looking all over the place for cheap shared hosting options. Besides price (under $15/mo or $180/yr), my basic plan requirements included plenty of bandwidth (20gb+/mo), decent storage space (5gb+) and the ability to host 3 or more domains/websites. Needless to say, I didn't find many. But there were a handful that definitely stood out, even if they didn't meet every single one of my previously listed requirements. As I'm not employed by or affiliated with any of the following hosts (besides Arvixe which I'm a customer of and use for my standard Linux hosting needs), and I haven't made my final decision yet, I figured I'd list the hosting options I found here first and see what you guys had to say about them. Quick note: All annual/bi-annual prices have been rounded up to the nearest dollar/pound.

So, without further ado:

Host Department

• Plan Name: CF Advanced

• Price: $163/2yrs (big discount), $87/yr (discount), $8.45/mo (no discount)

• Storage: Unlimited

• Bandwidth: Unlimited

• Domains/Sites: 5

• SQL DBs: Unlimited

• CF Version: 7.0.2

• Other Cheap Plans: "Starter" for $56/yr w/ discount ($5.45/mo no discount), only allows for 1 site/domain. "Professional" for $148/yr w/ discount ($14.45/mo no discount), allows for more sites/domains (10).

• Special Notes: Free domain for life included with all plans as long as payment is made annually.

DailyRazor

• Plan Name: CF Starter

• Price: $143/2yrs (big discount), $84/yr (discount), $7.95/mo (no discount)

• Storage: Unlimited

• Bandwidth: Unlimited

• Domains/Sites: 5

• SQL DBs: 2 MSSQL, 10 MySQL

• CF Version: 8/9/10

• Other Cheap Plans: "CF Edge" for $239/2yrs (big discount), $132/yr (discount) or $12.95/mo (no discount); includes more sites/domains (10) & more MS-/MySQL DBs (5/15).

• Special Notes: 3-year (36month) payment plan allows for biggest discount ($179 total for "CF Starter" plan), this is the price you see listed on their website (divides out into $4.95/mo).

HostMedia.co.uk

• Plan Name: Railo Standard

• Price: £24.95/yr (~$40/yr) OR ~$3.30/mo

• Storage: 10gb

• Bandwidth: 100gb/mo

• Domains/Sites: 5

• SQL DBs: Unlimited

• CF Version: Railo 4

• Other Cheap Plans: "Pro" Railo £84/yr (~$135/yr), includes more sites/domains (10), storage (25gb) & bandwidth (250gb).

• Special Notes: Regular CF plans also available but are more expensive.

YetiHost

• Plan Name: S-Oscar

• Price: $85/yr (discount) OR $8.49/mo (no discount)

• Storage: 5gb

• Bandwidth: Unlimited

• Domains/Sites: 5

• SQL DBs: Unlimited

• CF Version: MX 7

• Other Cheap Plans: "S-Delta" for $54/yr ($5.38/mo no discount), includes only 1 site/domain & less storage (1gb). "S-Tango" for $117/yr ($11.61/mo no discount), includes more sites/domains (20) & storage (15gb)

• Special Notes: None.

Arvixe

• Plan Name: PersonalClass ASP + OpenBD Addon

• Price: $72+60/yr (discount) OR $8+5/mo (no discount)

• Storage: Unlimited

• Bandwidth: Unlimited

• Domains/Sites: 6

• SQL DBs: Unlimited

• CF Version: Open BlueDragon

• Other Cheap Plans: "PersonalClass ASP Pro + OpenBD Addon" for $108+60/yr (discount) or $11+5/mo (no discount), includes more sites/domains (unlimited).

• Special Notes: Free domain name for life included w/ order. ColdFusion support is only available through an OpenBD addon applied to ASP.net shared hosting plans (this is the "+60" / "+5" amounts you see above. As a personal note, I use Arvixe for my regular Linux hosting, and have never been disappointed by their service, though I have yet to try any of their ASP.net/OpenBD hosting options.

Illuminated Hosting

• Plan Name: Shared Basic

• Price: $180/yr OR $15/mo

• Storage: 1gb

• Bandwidth: 400gb/mo

• Domains/Sites: ??

• SQL DBs: 1

• CF Version: 9/10

• Other Cheap Plans: "Ultra Basic" for $96/yr ($8/mo), includes less storage (500mb) & bandwidth (300gb).

• Special Notes: Unclear about # of domains allowed, but with only 1 SQL db allowed, I'd bet money it's just 1 domain per plan.

CFMLDeveloper.com

• Plan Name: Free

• Annual Price: Free

• Storage: 100mb

• Bandwidth: 1gb/mo

• Domains/Sites: 2

• SQL DBs: 2

• CF Version: 10

• Other Plans:

• Special Notes: $1 setup fee. For Development purposes only, not meant to be used for legitimate/commercial web hosting purposes. Really there isn't anything about this plan that fits into my criteria for selecting a suitable host (besides being free), but I figured I'd list it here anyways on the off chance it could be of use to someone else who didn't know about it.

There may be other similar cheap, shared hosting CF plans out there with different hosts - but after searching for 3 days with Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing - I have yet to find any. If you know of any, please let me know in a comment below and I'll be glad to research and add it if it meets a significant amount of my hosting criteria (see above). Thanks, and happy developing!

EDIT: So I wound up going with HostMedia.co.uk, mainly for 3 reasons: 1) They had the cheapest annual plan, 2) unlike most of the others, my sites will be hosted on a Linux server, which I'm much more familiar with than Windows servers and 3) The plan is actually a Railo plan, rather than plain old CF, which is kinda why I became interested in learning/developing CFML in the first place.

I also found a couple of other relatively cheap hosts after I purchased my plan from HostMedia, so I'll go ahead and list them here:

IX Web Hosting

• Plan Name: Unlimited Pro (Win)

• Price: $132/yr OR $41.85/quarterly

• Storage: Unlimited

• Bandwidth: Unlimited

• Domains/Sites: Unlimited

• SQL DBs: Unlimited

• CF Version: MX 7.0.2

• Other Cheap Plans: "Business Plus" is currently the EXACT same price, but comes with fewer unlimited features.

• Special Notes: Plan includes some pretty bad ass extras, like up to 15 free dedicated IP addresses, 3 free domain registrations, a free shared SSL cert, etc.

HostNexus

• Plan Name: fusionBRONZE

• Price: $100/yr OR $34.95/quarterly

• Storage: 10gb

• Bandwidth: 100gb

• Domains/Sites: 3

• SQL DBs: 10 MySQL, 10 MSSQL

• CF Version: 9

• Other Cheap Plans: None.

• Special Notes: Above plan is for Windows-based hosting plan, Linux plan also available but only allows for $100/yr annual payment plan.

Gert Franz, one of Lucee's cofounders, shows us what is new in Lucee 7 and beyond. He covered the new AI integration functions, enhanced Java support, ability to do vector and hybrid queries and a new secrets provider. Lucee 7 is now based on Jakarta EE instead of Java EE.

We were also joined by Mark Drew who showed us LuCli https://lucli.dev/ which is a focused command line tool just for Lucee. Lucee team member Zac Spitzer known as 'Zackster' also joined us and demoed the new and completely rewritten Lucee debugger.

Recording: https://youtu.be/qN-BGkpcAaM

Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group meets in East Lansing, Michigan. The group's website is at http://www.mmcfug.org

Find our channel at https://youtube.com u/cfml

Introducing RustCFML and IntelliLucee with Alex Skinner and Nick Kwiatkowski. Alex shows us his RustCFML project which is a CFML interpreter written in Rust. He demonstrates several uses including how to host CFML programs on CloudFlare. Nick shows us his work on the IntelliLucee plugin for the JetBrains suite of IDEs. He demos it working in Lucee, Adobe ColdFusion, BoxLang and RustCFML based engines.

Bonus - Gareth Edwards speaks about his upcoming plugin, Clif, for VSCode and Zed editor that gives some of the features Nick demonstrated for those editors.

Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi8G4yzVDTw

Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group meets in East Lansing, Michigan. The group's website is at http://www.mmcfug.org

Here is Peter Amiri's presentation on Wheels - the Rails-style CFML framework. Wheels brings those same ideas — convention over configuration, an ORM that generates parameterized SQL, scaffolding, migrations, tests as a first-class citizen — to CFML. You can watch Peter build a blog from a bare directory in under thirty minutes.

Recording: https://youtu.be/lgIwXMlinJw

Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group meets in East Lansing, Michigan. The group's website is at http://www.mmcfug.org

Find our channel at https://youtube.com u/cfml

Hello ya'll CFers!

When I became the moderator of this subreddit, it hadn't been live for about a year. I took it over knowing that I would be retiring soon, and I would want to pass it off to someone else.

Well...that retirement is getting very close! (42 days!)

I am looking for someone who would like to be the moderator here. It's a fairly easy task, but we do need someone willing to do it.

Please let me know if you are interested in being the moderator for r/coldfusion

Thanks!

Gert Franz is going to show us what is new in Lucee 7 at the next Mid-Michigan CFUG meeting on Tuesday, February 10^th  at 7:00 pm eastern time.

Gert will cover the new AI integration functions, enhanced Java support, ability to do vector and hybrid queries and a new secrets provider.  Lucee 7 is now based on Jakarta EE instead of Java EE.  He is also going to share what is coming in future versions.

Meeting URL and Passcode next week.

A recording will be available on our group’s YouTube channel in a few days at https://youtube.com/@cfml

It finally arrived. ColdFusion 2023 Update 25 updates log4j and lots of other libraries.

More info here: https://guides.adobe.com/coldfusion/en/docs/install-and-configure-coldfusion/coldfusion-2023-release-update-25.html

Hey everyone.

"ColdFusion is a dead language." If you've been working with CFML for a while, you already know how it feels.

But as a language, CF keeps running U$ billions every day. The CFML community is small. Loyal. And completely orphaned from modern tooling. I've suffered a lot from this in our projects.

From solutions I adopted to deal with problems, a project was born, which I'm here to share with you.

B.E.N. is the first native MCP system for CFML, combining:

• MCP Server — direct integration with Trae, Cursor, VS Code and any IDE with MCP support.

• MoE + LLM Agent — intelligent routing between multiple language models.

• API Key Management and Rotation System — automatic key management with fallback, cooldown and budget control.

It is the first native MCP Server for CFML. It is an autonomous agent with intelligent routing between multiple LLMs, including local ones. It is a key management system that makes access to AI accessible even for those operating with a limited budget. Includes support for free API keys.

Integration with Agents and IDEs

Any tool that implements the MCP client can consume the server directly:

• Trae IDE : Native integration via mcp.json, the tools appear as u/cfml in the chat. This is the most direct case described in the README.

• Cursor: Built-in MCP support since 2024, same configuration as Trae.

• VS Code: Via the official Anthropic MCP extension or extensions like Continue.dev, which already support external MCP servers.

• Claude Desktop: Adds the server to claude_desktop_config.json and you have all the tools available in the desktop interface.

• Continue.dev : Open-source extension for VS Code and JetBrains that supports MCP. A good option for those who use IntelliJ or GoLand along with CFBuilder.

• Custom agents via SDK : Any code that uses u/modelcontextprotocol/sdk can connect as a client. The system's own cfml-mcp-agent is an example of this: it connects via stdio and acts autonomously.

• n8n / Make (Integromat) : with the SSE transport enabled (simply replace StdioServerTransport with SSEServerTransport in index.ts), the server becomes an HTTP endpoint that any automation platform can call. Useful for triggering TestBox tests in a GitHub deployment webhook, for example.

• GitHub Actions / CI pipelines: the MCP Server can run as a step in the pipeline, validating all .cfm/.cfc files in the PR before merging, without needing an IDE.

The only requirement to integrate with any of these tools is that they support MCP (stdio or SSE) — which is rapidly becoming standard, with Microsoft, JetBrains, and Google already announcing native support in their IDEs.

Free for:

• Personal use

• Open source projects

• Learning, experimentation, and contribution

More info, documentation and source code are available at:

https://github.com/pemartins1970/ben-cfml-mcp-system

It's an initial effort. I hope this is helpful. Issues, PRs, and feedback are very welcome.

If you use CFML in production and want to test it, especially if you have use cases that I haven't covered, send me a message.

Hey, so I have been working as a dev at a company with a CF legacy backend for a couple of years now, and while I have a couple of issues with the language I absolutely love how easy it makes it to interact with SQL. The ability to just drop into native SQL whenever I want, along with safety tools like CFqueryparam and CFtransaction, make CF, hands down, the easiest language I have ever coded in for interacting with the database. This has made me wonder, why don't any of the more modern languages that have taken over CFs market share try to emulate this feature? It seems like, if I were designing a server language, I would want methods that do things like CFquery, CFqueryparam, and CFtransaction, rather than having to do all this stuff imperatively, as is the norm in most languages. I was wondering if any more experienced CF devs have any thoughts on this.