Hurray! ColdFusion 2016 no longer uses Akamai Download Manager

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

For many, that's all they need to know. For others, there are some more points worth discussing. Read on, if that may interest you.

This is a continuation of a multi-part series of posts on the introduction of CF2016.

Pros, but mostly cons, of the DL Mgr

Now, we should acknowledge that there was some value to that tool: it helped managed the download, recover from paused or failed ones, and so on. (And given that the CF download is now over a gig, because of the inclusion of the API manager, that's not an insignificant value.)

Still, it had many warts. Many found that the link for the download didn't work at all, or was challenging to use. And it wasn't supported at all on Linux. Such folks were forced to find/go to a Windows machine just to get the file, then bring it to their "real" machine, all making it challenging just to download CF!

Even when it DID work, it was also hard to know where the downloaded file ended up. You weren't asked where to put it, because it offered to proceed to install it. If you did want it, it was hard to find, buried in a folder that one would rarely expect to look in.

And that's just a couple of the negatives. While it did also give Adobe useful analytics (about downloads, pauses, download times, and more), the pain for many was just too much.

It also wasn't new to CF 2016. In my consulting work (which often involves helping people install, update, or migrate to different CF versions) I often watched as they struggled using it to get CF11 also, and so on.

The CF team listened, and reversed course

Anyway, let's celebrate the positive: the CF team heard the complaints this week, as many tried to get CF 2016, and somehow they were able to get the "wider" Adobe IT team and gatekeepers to lift the requirement to use the download manager.

So go get it, and check it out. And see my recent other blog posts on CF 2016, and more to come. (And there are certainly others out there blogging about it.)

What about downloading CF11?

Let me get this out here now, as surely someone would ask: "how do I get CF11 downloads?"

As far as I know, Adobe has pulled the downloads from any public location on the site. I don't understand it, but they did the same with CF10 when CF11 came out--even though at that time both CF10 and even CF9 were still supported. And now, even though both C10 and 11 are still supported, you can no longer find downloads for either on the Adobe site in any public location that I know of. If anyone knows one, please let us know here. I'd make a new post devoted just to that topic, and may anyway to share this info I have here, as some may not think to find it in this post.

But here's good news: one CAN definitely get CF11, or 10, or indeed most any release via the CF Repo that Gavin Pickin created, and several of us contribute to, available at http://tinyurl.com/cfdownloads. I've talked about it before.

Hope all that's helpful.

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