Macromedia Studio MX

Nobody can accuse Macromedia of a lack of ambition. The company's aim with its new Studio MX suite is to make it as dominant in the Web-authoring arena as Microsoft Office is in office productivity. It's a tall order, but with the latest versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash and FreeHand in the box - all at a bargain price - it's an attractive starting proposition. However, as Microsoft has shown, there's a lot more to a successful suite than bundling. So do the Studio apps work together to turn MX into a coherent and attractive platform?

The centre of Studio MX is the new MX version of Dreamweaver. Back in 1997, Dreamweaver was the first professional application to offer both visual and code-based control over the HTML pages that make up the Web. Five years later, it has about 2.5 million users and has become almost as dominant for high-end Web authoring as Photoshop is for professional photo editing.

However, in its new MX incarnation, existing users are in for a surprise. The familiar multiwindowed, floating-palette interface is replaced by the new MX look and feel. It takes a bit of getting used to, but the dockable panel groups and tabbed document windows soon prove far more efficient. Other welcome interface changes include the new tabbed Insert toolbar, integrated file browsing and the revamped context-sensitive Properties panel.

Unlike alternatives such as Adobe GoLive (version 6 reviewed issue 90, p144), Dreamweaver has always encouraged direct code editing, and in MX this has been brought to centre stage. New features include Code Hinting, which automatically displays appropriate options as you type, a Snippets panel for storing common pieces of code, and some expanded reference material. Emphasis is on the tag-based nature of Web authoring, with a HomeSite-inspired Tag Inspector for viewing an editable list of all tags and their attributes in the current document, and a Tag Chooser and Tag Editor to add new ones.

The biggest change in Dreamweaver MX isn't the integration of the previously separate HomeSite functionality, but the incorporation of UltraDev. UltraDev 6 was the choice for high-end Web application developers working with ASP and JSP to produce enterprise-level, data-driven sites. Now this functionality has been made a seamless part of the core program, with features such as the new Site Setup Wizard and dedicated Database, Bindings and Server Behaviour panels making it relatively straightforward for users to move from creating static HTML to producing server-generated dynamic pages (see p212).

What's particularly impressive about the Dreamweaver MX implementation is how broad its server-side support is. As well as ASP and JSP, support has been added for PHP, ASP .NET and ColdFusion. Users of the last two server platforms or JSP can also take advantage of the exciting new area of XML-based Web Services. Thanks to Dreamweaver MX's dedicated Components panel, this becomes a simple task of drag, drop and customise.

Support for all major standards means users can choose the option that best suits their needs, but one technology is definitely first among equals - Macromedia's own ColdFusion server software. A Developer Edition of the newly rewritten, Java-based, cross-platform ColdFusion MX Server (see Enterprise, issue 94, p188) is included with Studio to enable easy local testing. Other benefits include built-in debugging and tracing, the ability to create reusable ColdFusion components and to instantly turn them into universally accessible Web Services.