Why Dreamweaver Has All Bases Covered

When we run Dreamweaver training courses, we are always amazed at the number of different types of Dreamweaver user who attend our courses. There is simply no longer a typical Dreamweaver user. We get people working from all types of organisation in all types of role. Private individuals, accounts specialists, marketing specialists, academics, workers in the health services...

Our conclusion is that the vast majority of people learning Dreamweaver nowadays are not specialists in web development or web design. They are simply people who need to develop web content in some shape or form and who have chosen or been recommended Dreamweaver as the best tool for the job. Dreamweaver is perceived as the obvious choice for both casual and professional web developers.

Dreamweaver has become the industry standard web development software, seeing off rivals like Microsoft FrontPage. And it deserves its position. It is a great software package with powerful features and an approachable interface which lets anybody who can use a computer embark on a basic software development project and, with a bit of patience and knowledge of a few fundamentals, bring it to a conclusion. Dreamweaver has attained this dominant position because its creators have always aimed to satisfy the needs of all the different types of users of their software.

Back in the nineties when web editors (such as PageMill, Hot Metal Pro, FrontPage and Dreamweaver) started to appear, they were greeted with some scepticism by serious web developers (coders) who felt that they produced sloppy code and were really only of interest to people who didn't understand code and, basically didn't know what they were doing. Even back then, Macromedia, who owned Dreamweaver, bundled HomeSite (a Windows HTML code editor) or BBEdit (with the Macintosh version) to keep serious web developers happy.

About ten years ago (recognising the need to satisfy both types of user), Macromedia, the owners of Dreamweaver started making efforts to attract serious web developers to Dreamweaver. They addressed the code issue by including tools which would clean up inefficiencies in automatically-generated code and purchasing and bundling a coding utility called with Dreamweaver. They also enhanced their code environment with sophisticated features like line-numbering, colour-coding and code-hints and added other code-friendly features to supplement the visual development environment such as the tag selector which displays the HTML tags representing the objects on the page.

In June 2000, Macromedia added another string to their bow by releasing a special edition of Dreamweaver called Dreamweaver UltraDev. This version of Dreamweaver contained all the features of the basic programs but added special utilities for creating dynamic content. Users could create server-side content using ASP, ColdFusion or JavaServer pages. The program automatically generated code for connecting to a database, retrieving and displaying data and linking elements on a web page to a data source. Two years later, they dropped UltraDev and added all of its functionality into the standard version of Dreamweaver, further enhancing its appeal to serious web developers.

Recognising that many web developers are members of a team, Macromedia also added features to Dreamweaver allowing teams of people to collaborate on the same site while avoiding the risk of two people making conflicting changes to the same page. Dreamweaver's collaborative features were called "File Check in/Check out". The program also introduced a feature known as "Design Notes". This allowed one developer to attach a note to a particular web page which could then be browsed by other members of his or her team.

Recognising that the web is not a static environment but is still constantly evolving, Macromedia (and now Adobe) have kept an eye on emerging web technologies and incorporated content relating to those technologies. Dreamweaver behaviors can be used to create useful JavaScript functions for such things as form validation. XML code can be edited and validated. Another illustration of the way in which Dreamweaver embraces emerging standards can be seen in the way in which Dreamweaver CS3 now encourages developers to use CSS to layout their pages rather than using tables, making their pages compliant with current standards.

Dreamweaver CS3, the latest version of the program, also incorporates some great new features for adding Ajax functionality to web pages. Ajax offers web developers a way of creating web applications that execute rapidly and are seamlessly incorporated into the standard content of the web page. Coding Ajax web applications requires a good knowledge of JavaScript programming. Using Dreamweaver's Spry Framework for Ajax, developers can create sophisticated Ajax applications without having to write the code themselves.

As new features are added to Dreamweaver with each new release, the program continues to have an interface which is user-friendly and approachable by any experienced computer user, bringing web development within reach of just about everybody on the planet. And it is this policy of satisfying the needs of professionals as well as beginners which will doubtless continue to make it the obvious choice for anyone wanting to develop web content at any level.

Article Source: Main Articles

The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver Classes in London and throughout the UK.

This article may be reproduced wholly or in part without written permission provided the byline, resource area, and any hyperlinks remain in order to give proper credit to the author.

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