Specifications

24 Migrating ColdFusion 5 Applications

Other changes

This section describes other changes between ColdFusion 5 and ColdFusion MX.

Character encoding

ColdFusion MX uses the UTF-8 character set encoding as its default encoding.

ColdFusion 5 used the ISO-8859-1 character set encoding. This can affect the way that

characters in the range 128–255 are displayed in the browser. To restore the

ColdFusion 5 default encoding, place the following

cfcontent tag in your page (or in

the application’s Application.cfm page):

Note: UTF-8 (USC Transformation Format, where USC is the Universal Character Set)

enables computers to handle both ASCII and Unicode. Unicode (Unicode Worldwide

Character Standard) is a system of setting up binary codes for text or script characters, so

that the characters from the principal written languages of the world can be displayed and

processed.

Advanced Security

ColdFusion MX provides a new and easy way for you to build user authentication and

roles-based security into your applications. However, it is based on a completely different

security model than ColdFusion 5. Also, ColdFusion MX no longer includes a licensed

version of Netegrity Siteminder. Therefore, any existing Advanced Security

code—including the

cfauthenticate and cfimpersonate tags, and the

authenticatedContext(), authenticatedUser(), isAuthenticated(),

isProtected(), and isAuthorized() functions—no longer works in ColdFusion MX.

These tags and functions are obsolete in ColdFusion MX.

For more information about application security, see Developing ColdFusion MX

Applications with CFML.

SNMP support

ColdFusion MX no longer supports Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) for

monitoring ColdFusion applications from enterprise management systems.

Variables

Following are changes to variables in ColdFusion MX:

• You can no longer use a dot (.) in a variable name, because ColdFusion MX supports

the dot notation as a dot operator to create a struct. For example,

last.name creates

a struct called

last with a key called name, instead of creating a simple variable whose

name has a period in it.

To work around this, use underscores in variable names instead.

• The following cfcatch variables have changed: Message, NativeErrorCode, and

SQLState. For more information, see cfcatch in “CFML tags and attributes” on

page 7.