Dreamweaver tryout

Notes On DreamWeaver:
Okay, the first screen that pops up when the application opens has a long list of possible actions to take. About a third of them involve terms or choices I have never heard of.

I click a link that takes me to a webpage with Adobe help and resources. A long list of contents in the index sidebar on this page…and a search window. Again, terms I don’t think I’ve heard before, or at least have no clue what they are referring to. What is an ASP.NET, what is ColdFusion forms, what are Spry pages…what is CSS? I click on a link to the online Help Resource Center online documentation , select Dreamweaver, and end up with a way to access comprehensive hlep for “using Dreamweaver” for “Spry 1.4 Developer Guide” “Extending Dreamweaver” and Dreamweaver API Reference. All four of these have links to LiveDocs or PDF.

On this same page there’s also a sidebar of additional resources, forums, developer center, design center, training, labs….and knowledgebase, dreamweaver exchange, extension manager, live docs … There I find a link to something called CS3 Video Workshop. Which has a number of tutorials for different Adobe products. I choose Dreamweaver after starting the Video Workshop, which shows all the topics available for Dreamweaver. I choose the topic “getting started” , and that shows a list of videos for that topic. I click to watch “creating links” which is about 4 minutes, and shows how to create links within the site, outside the site and to an email function.

That looks very easy to do. So I’m off to a good start, plus I get to see the layout of the DW windows for a site creation….
After watching one more getting started “video” I open DW to take a look at a site using a starter page….hoping to see what windows open, and where the menus are and what’s in the menus etc.

It tells me I must start a new site in the manage sites window. This leads to opening the “site definition” dialog box/wizard, which I’m not ready for, so I cancel. I also find the Adobe Help Viewer 1.1 which is apparently not online but a separate app that has opened in my laptop’s memory. It looks a lot like what the help online looks like. I decide to check out what’s new in Dreamweaver 9. That’s a good choice because it explains a number of items such as Spry… After reading through this I decide I’m tired of not knowing some of the terms such as CSS etc and look it up at wikipedia…ah, Cascading Style Sheets…

Reading about CSS there are links to a veritable sea of acronyms…a zillion MLs, and then stuff like AJAX, and the above ASP.net and Yet to see a link reference to “cold fusion” but wikipedia is obviously an education in itself about this stuff. Looked up any term I had heard of, and got some idea of what it does. Apparently LAMP is a very good way to go…Have to see how that works with Dreamweaver…

LAMP Linux is the operating system, Apache is the web server application, MYSQL is the database server/.database management system.and P is for PHP the server side scripting language/programming language which allows added features such as widg ets. I think.

Apache is primarily used to serve both static content and dynamic Web pages on the World Wide Web. Many web applications are designed expecting the environment and features that Apache provides.

Apache is the web server component of the popular LAMP web server application stack, alongside Linux, MySQL, and the PHP/Perl/Python programming languages.

Apache is redistributed as part of various proprietary software packages including the Oracle RDBMS or the IBM WebSphere application server. Mac OS X integrates Apache as its built-in web server and as support for its WebObjects application server. It is also supported in some way by Borland in the Kylix and Delphi development tools. Apache is included with Novell NetWare 6.5, where it is the default web server.

Apache is used for many other tasks where content needs to be made available in a secure and reliable way. One example is sharing files from a personal computer over the Internet. A user who has Apache installed on their desktop can put arbitrary files in the Apache’s document root which can then be shared.

Programmers developing web applications often use a locally installed version of Apache in order to preview and test code as it is being developed.
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is the main competitor to Apache, trailed by Sun Microsystems’ Sun Java System Web Server and a host of other applications such as Zeus Web Serve

PHP primarily acts as a filter. The PHP program takes input from a file or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display.

So then I thought, look up Dreamweaver on wikipedia see what they say about it. Heres’ what it says:

Dreamweaver is a web development tool.

As a WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages’ HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-coders to create web pages and sites. A professional criticism of this approach is that it produces HTML pages whose file size and amount of HTML code is much larger than they should be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards though this has improved considerably in recent versions. Dreamweaver 8.0 (the version prior to the recently released 9.0 within CS3) performed poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Macromedia has increased the support for CSS and other ways to lay out a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.


Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in many browsers, provided that they are installed on their computer. It also has some site management tools, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters specified across the entire site, and a templatization feature for creating multiple pages with similar structures. The behaviors panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge.

With the advent of version MX, Macromedia incorporated dynamic content creation tools into Dreamweaver. In the spirit of HTML WYSIWYG tools, it allows users to connect to databases (such as MySQL and Microsoft Access) to filter and display content using scripting technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASP), ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages (JSP), PHP, and more without any previous programming experience. Dreamweaver 8.0 also included support for WYSIWYG XSLT editing.

Dreamweaver can use “Extensions” – small programs, which any web developer can write (usually in HTML and JavaScript). Extensions provide added functionality to the software for whoever wants to download and install them. Dreamweaver is supported by a large community of extension developers who make extensions available (both commercial and free) for most web development tasks from simple rollover effects to full-featured shopping carts.

As of version 8, Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting for the following languages out of the box:
• ActionScript
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• ASP.NET
• C#
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• ColdFusion
• EDML
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
• Java
• JavaScript
• JavaServer Pages (JSP)
• PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
• Visual Basic (VB)
• Visual Basic Script Edition (VBScript)
• Wireless Markup Language (WML)

It is also possible to add your own language syntax highlighting to its repertoire.

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that displays text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and syntax errors are visually distinct. Some editors also integrate syntax highlighting with other features, such as spell checking or code folding.

The Spry Framework is an open source Ajax framework developed by Adobe which is used in the construction of Rich Internet Applications. Unlike other pure JavaScript frameworks such as the Dojo Toolkit and Prototype, Spry is geared towards web designers, not web developers, although it is increasingly difficult to decouple these two fields.

The Spry framework broadly consists of
• Spry Effects – animation effects based on the Script.aculo.us library
• Spry Data – data binding to HTML markup using minimal code or proprietary markup. Spry uses Google’s XSLT JavaScript library to convert XML into JavaScript objects
• Spry Widgets – framework for development of widgets, and included widgets such as the accordion