ColdFusion 8 CHF4 [doesn't] break CFIMAGE [UPDATE]
UPDATE 2: There is actually an issue with ColdFusion Cumulative Hotfix 4, though it's not the Hotfix itself, it's the installation instructions explicitly telling you to skip installing another hotfix if you're not on JVM 1.5. Don't skip installing hf801-71557, even when you're on JVM 1.6 - that has fixed it with our installation.
String methods: ColdFusion vs. Java
You may know from previous blog posts that I strongly advise every ColdFusion developer to familiarize himself/herself with the thing that actually makes ColdFusion tick, i.e. with Java. Everybody who writes a single line of CFML should know about the possibilities of extending ColdFusion by directly accessing the underlying Java methods of certain objects. One of the datatypes where actually using Java may make a lot of sense is the string object.
ColdFusion string literals are just plain old Java strings. If you grab a string from e.g. a query object like variables.qMyQuery.myTextColumn, you need to be careful though - even if you think you just have one tuple returned, you've got something other than a string object on your hands. In such a case you need to either specifically target a certain row (like variables.qMyQuery.myTextColumn[1]) or you wrap it up in a JavaCast like Javacast('string',variables.qMyQuery.myTextColumn).
I finally found a moment to actually do some benchmarking on some of the built-in ColdFusion functions against their Java counterparts. This is not a benchmark of Java vs. ColdFusion performance, mind you, it's about deciding whether to use Java-methods inside of ColdFusion vs. ColdFusion's built-in string functions.