Product Reviews

Macromedia's Dreamweaver Web design application has long been the market leader. This latest release, dubbed Dreamweaver MX, clearly shows that Macromedia is determined to hold on to its pre-eminent position. Not only is the update Mac OS X native, but it adds some significant features, especially to the interface.

Dreamweaver's look and feel has been completely redesigned in line with Macromedia's MX theme. First seen in Flash MX, it uses collapsible, dockable panels to manage the clutter inherent to any modern, mature application effectively. With Dreamweaver MX, the MX interface really comes into its own and makes the entire package easier to understand and use, even for those unfamiliar with the application.

There are two essential parts to the interface. The first is the Panel Group along the top, which is a tabbed elongated panel that includes the most commonly used Dreamweaver tools. This effectively replaces the tabbed palette of previous versions, including tools, tool sets for templates, frames and layout. As with most aspects of the new interface, it can be completely customised by the user.

The second main part of the interface is the collapsible panels, which usually reside on the right- hand side of the screen. These cover simple headings, such as Design, Code, Applications, Files and Answers, which make it easy to find some of the programs more powerful features. Expand the Code panel, for example, and you have access to the Tag Inspector, Snippets and Reference. Even users who loved the old Dreamweaver interface will be working faster after an hour or two using the new one.

Two become one

Previously, there were two versions of Dreamweaver: the main application itself and UltraDev, an expanded version that gives access to Web application development tools. Dreamweaver MX unifies the two versions into one, so that every Dreamweaver user now has the ability to develop Web applications

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using JSP, ASP, ASP.NET and Macromedia's own ColdFusion Web development environment.

The release of Dreamweaver MX marks the first time a visual ColdFusion development environment has been available on the Mac, although the ColdFusion Server itself remains a Windows or Unix product.

Many of the other tools and features of Dreamweaver MX will be familiar to anyone who has used the product before. However, the template feature has been significantly enhanced to such an extent that Dreamweaver is now the most powerful solution to template-driven collaborative site design.

Regional differences

One new feature is repeating regions, which allows you to create a region of the template that can be edited and repeated by end users who don't have access to change the rest of the page. For example, developers could set up a table row as a repeating region, which would then let end users create an expanding list, repeating the row as required. This alone significantly expands the usefulness of templates.

A second enhancement for templates is the addition of optional regions. As the name suggests, these are regions that may or may not appear - for example, a graphic that appears on some pages, but not on others. This takes away the need to produce either two sets of almost identical templates, or an empty editable region that could optionally hold content. It's even possible to use parameters to automatically decide if a region is visible or not.

Template developers can also make a specific tag editable, which allows them to unlock a particular tag attribute for users to change. This allows, for example, template users to embolden sections of text as required, without having to refer the page back to the developer.

Of course, Dreamweaver MX includes all the features that have made previous versions popular, from built-in check in/check out of pages on the server to site mapping and full support for just about every version of HTML ever made.

The Reference tab includes O'Reilly HTML, CSS and JavaScript references, as well as five other handy reference manuals. The manual itself is comprehensive and stretches to 719 pages.

Thankfully, though, the new interface means that Dreamweaver combines a huge number of features for professional Web development with a more accessible approach. Even if you're not going to use all of the database driven application development features, Dreamweaver MX is a worthy purchase, and a worthy upgrade for current users.