Things to keep in mind during Application Migration: ColdFusion to Spring

Question

This question is regarding migration project. Currently the legacy Application is in ColdFusion and we want to migrate it to Spring Framework.

So my main questions

Answer 1

Much is going to depend on the existing structure of your CFML application. Whilst there is a framework available for CFML that matches the IoC portion of Spring fairly closely, I suspect you're looking at migrating from an unstructured CFML application to Spring Web, rather than just the IoC portion - and you're looking at moving from one language to another: CFML to Java.

So the reality is: it's not a migration project, it's a complete ground-up rewrite.

I know you said "Migration is an requirement" (sic) but I think you need to explain a bit more about what's driving this so folks can provide a better answer than "You're crazy, don't do it!" - because with the little information you've provided, no one is going to be able to provide a useful answer.

As for the mechanics of such a migration, IF you have a well-structured, MVC CFML application that uses ColdSpring, you could migrate the model, piece-by-piece to Java and use Spring's IoC instead of ColdSpring for bean management (you'd want Spring to be the parent bean factory for ColdSpring so that the rest of your CFML code could still access the newly migrated beans).

Once you have all your model (and data access layer) migrated to Java / Spring, you would then tackle the translation of all your .cfm view pages to .jsp view pages and rewrite all of your CFML controllers / listeners (depending on which CFML framework is in use) to Spring Web handlers.

It's likely to be a massive project - and that's assuming a well-structured, MVC-framework-powered CFML application that's already using ColdSpring to manage the model.

I'll bet that what you're starting with is an unstructured mess (which is why there's a directive to migrate) in which case your massive project just got more massive.