ColdFusion Now Free For Educational Use

Education is not a "version" or a new edition of the product like Developer, Standard or Enterprise Editions are. Rather its a educational offer of CF8 Enterprise for educational teaching/learning purposes. Think of it as CF Ent offer to Edu rather than a new or different version.

Well, Developer Edition is Enterprise Edition with IP address restrictions, so it will accept requests from a limited number of clients. Enterprise Edition obviously has no such restrictions. --- Ben

I just submitted that exact question to Adobe to get an answer. I will keep you posted.

Can someone please help me out in understanding the difference between development version and education version?

Excellent Ben! In Brazil, I began the first group of ColdFusion in Universities. It is a basic course of 20 hours with 24 students, between students and employees of the University. http://www.tofinha.com.br/index.cfm/2008/8/31/Minha-turma-de-ColdFusion-na-Unieuro We are already preparing the second group. Next year, ColdFusion will be in the contents of TI of this University. This news came on time!

Thank you very much! I have been eagerly awaiting this release ever since I heard about it. You guys are awesome!

If you try and register as 'Others', it then says "Will Flex be taught in a formal class", "Are you requesting Flex for a lab". Should it say ColdFusion?

We're excited to see how educational instutions use this program. We're actually right on time for launching the offer (couple months since CFUnited where we preannounced). If you want more info on the offer you can check out http://www.webbschofield.com/index.cfm/2008/9/2/ColdFusion-8-Now-Available-to-Students-and-Educators-for-Free (I'll be fielding questions too). As your institutions use and teach CF, please feel free to drop me a note and let me know what you're doing with it. - Kristen

This is a great news!!

Here is my response from Adobe. From your description it appears that you purchased CF8 for creating business applications. CF8 Enterprise is only available for learning purposes. You cannot use it for production applications. The Enterprise version is just for teaching applications no for loading on a live public web server.

If the "educational" version is just for learning the app and not for use in production, how is that different from the development version, which I used to the same end? It seems like semantics or marketing-speak to me.

Hi Ben, Nice to have you in Bangalore. Unfortunately, I cannot attend the event because my unavailability. However, I have one problem to discuss with you and get some help. Here it goes.: I have Coldfusion installed on Windows machine and want to run & send parameters to unix shell script which is running on unix machine. This shell script is communicating with database and returning the values. Could you suggest any pointers to overcome this issue. Regards, -Nouman Naveed

This is nice but kind of pointless. If someone wanted to learn it they used to download the Enterprise version and learn it, or put it on a VM to mess around with it. Adobe needs to figure out how to make it really free so that more people adopt coldfusion or open source the thing. Most devevlopers who we get now work with PHP, Ruby, Python and even .NET as it is free. Not CF. Oracle has a free tool called APEX for development as well. With great features in CF and if it had a free version and a paid version with the bells and whistles it could bring CF back to the mainstream. People who were locked into it from a while still use it but I am not sure people are adopting it as they used too with all other alternatives being free.

From what I understand here is that the idea is to have a practice server that isn't serving business-production applications for the institution you are teaching in or from. Everything beyond that requires a license to do so. Imagine having an instance of CF for a CF class where students need to post projects so that they can share with their classmates and/or put in their portfolio. It's still accessible, yet not a "production" application for the institution. For the actual institution, if they want to run CFML web apps for 'free', maybe another solution is http://www.openbluedragon.org/

Glad to see this extended for ColdFusion 9 - MoBo died on computer so recalled this post to see if I could get CF9 - and I can, Awesome. To bad the page is processed by PHP and transaction doesn't appear in my Adobe Account - but not complaining at all. :-)