development will take longer? you will need bigger servers and more debugging - its not necessarily a better option however if you need a great deal of flexibility and access to more varied apis that coldfusion can provide its becomes inevitable that you move. The more traditional comparison points - cost, speed of development, ease of maintainance dont apply here as if you have the talent inside the company and coldfusion can do everything you want it to then i woud stick with it. What j2ee primarily provides is access to legacy applications, a huge set of APIs, more room for tweaking for performance.