Macromedia Dreamweaver MX review

Server-side support

Dreamweaver MX supports programming for several types of server-side technologies, the main ones being PHP, ASP, ASP .NET and, of course, Macromedia's own ColdFusion MX (see Enterprise, p188). The integration with ColdFusion is - as you might expect - superb, with full debugging capabilities of both client and server-side code. With all the technologies supported, attaching to data sources is easy and you can now also browse the data source fully, inspecting the tables, views and fields contained within before you create a record set to use within your Web site. The data fields from this record set can then be dragged and dropped onto your Web page and you can preview the data as it would appear with the 'live data' view. Previous versions of UltraDev had this, but Macromedia has now extended it further to include XML data sources as well as Web Services.

Within the design environment, you can connect to an external Web Service, either on your own network or out on the Internet. Dreamweaver MX can then create a Web proxy that will convert the XML data returned by the Web Service into a form of data that you can then drag and drop onto your Web site page. This is fantastic stuff - it seems at long last we have a design environment that will provide a graphical front end to many of the new technologies, which takes a lot of the grief out of coding. Obviously, there's no substitute to knowing how all this stuff works yourself, but at least you can get something up and running and then investigate.

The code that Dreamweaver MX writes also seems much better, with proper closing and flushing of connections on each page, which stops a busy site grinding to a halt. There's also a window called 'code snippets', which is a large collection of useful bits of code that you can drag and drop onto your Web page and customise. Even better than this is the ability to add your own code snippets, which then become available to all sites that you edit. How often have you written some useful code on one Web site that fixed a problem, and found that you needed to do the same on a new site? Normally, you'd have to trawl through various files, but it's so much better to add this code as a reusable snippet within the design environment of Dreamweaver. It begs the question as to when will we be able to do the same with site assets - the objects like images or colours, which you can currently add to your favourites area, although this area is still only available on a single site.

Dreamweaver will check a Web page against the new XHTML standards on the fly as well as converting existing pages to become XHTML compliant. A lot of this checking involves making sure that every tag has a closing tag and that they're in the correct case. The reason for this move towards a firmer structure to HTML is so that future clients that are used to reading the XHTML pages can be lighter and dumber than their current cousins. This helps in the implementation of a browser on mobile devices where the processors are slower and there's less memory. If you follow the Macromedia path to develop new Web applications, you could ignore browser differences altogether and create a Web site that will render the same in all devices and browsers using Flash talking to a back-end Web Service. Dreamweaver MX makes round-trip editing with Flash and ColdFusion easy; couple this with a new level of debugging and the concept starts to look achievable.

You may think Dreamweaver MX is about developing using Macromedia technologies only, but this couldn't be further from the truth - support for ASP .NET in Dreamweaver MX is superb. Full coding support for PHP is also built in, and the list of browsers against which Dreamweaver will test compatibilities has been expanded to include Opera as well as Netscape and Internet Explorer.