Jun
20ColdFusion Free for Educational Users

ColdFusion evangelist (deity?) Ben Forta recently announced that Adobe is making ColdFusion available for free for educational users. This is exciting news for many universities, though it's not clear if all server versions of ColdFusion are free as it turns out, no server versions are free. This is a program focused on free software for training and personal use in higher education.

If I were at CFUnited, I might know more. On the one hand, this announcement could be an indicator that ColdFusion is losing market share as a development language. Afterall, PHP is free, so many people migrate towards that instead. That said, many aspects of ColdFusion are easier to learn and implement than they are in PHP. It will be a few weeks before the ColdFusion plan is available from Adobe, so we are probably upgrading to ColdFusion 8 in the traditional manner: we'll pay for it. We hope to do this soon.

In reading about this announcement, I also discovered that Adobe already has a program to give away Flex Builder 3 Professional for educational users. I just signed up to get a license. Once we have the time, we'll explore possible Flex applications for our law library.