So, you're committed to bringing your legacy ColdFusion app into this century. You've been following along with these posts, and maybe even started to study some of the latest technologies. Now comes the big question. Are you sure?
Hopefully, you know your app. Is it big? Is it small? Are there a large number of sub-applications? I'm not gonna lie to you, there's a lot of work ahead. A lot of it is very tedious and repititive too. Right now, you are at a crossroads. (How fitting that you're here...) You've got a decision to make.
It's time to look at the ROI. How much time, money and effort do you already have in this application? You have to weight the pros and cons of your actions, in relation to the bigger picture. You have a couple of different directions that you can go from here.
You can just rewrite your app from the ground up. If your app isn't that big, this might be a really good opportunity to go ahead and start from scratch. You might decide, at this point, that you want to work on an entirely different tech stack. OK, I can see that there might be real, viable reasons to go that way. That said, I also know the true Rapid Application Development capable with ColdFusion, in the hands of a talented developer, so for me the reasoning to move to something else would have to be overwhelmingly compelling.
You can scrap your app, and replace it with a COTS alternative. This only works if there is a COTS alternative, and even then you have to find a way to handle data migration.
The final option is to refactor. This will typically be slow, requiring you to pick apart your applications, document process and workflow, and truly think about what's going on under the covers. There will be trial and error. Version control branching strategies will become critical. The big advantage here is, you have code, so you have a blueprint for how it was all supposed to work.
So know, going in to this decision, that if you choose this last option you will have a lot of work ahead of you. But, in the end, you should also end up with a well documented application, for which you will know every in-and-out.
So, time to decide. Are you up for the game? Or bowing out? If you're coming back to the table, in my next post we'll really start digging in on "how" to upgrade that legacy app.
This article is the fifth in a series of articles on bringing life back to your legacy ColdFusion applications. Follow along in the Legacy Code category.
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