Adobe Dreamweaver

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“Dreamweaver” redirects here. For other uses, see Dreamweaver (disambiguation).

Adobe Dreamweaver

Developer:	Adobe Systems (formerly Macromedia)
Latest release:	CS3 (9.0) / March 27, 2007
OS:	Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
Use:	HTML editor
License:	Closed source
Website:	www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver, or simply Dreamweaver, is a web development tool, originally created by Macromedia. Initial versions of the application served as simple WYSIWYG HTML editors but more recent versions have incorporated notable support for many other web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting frameworks. [1] The software is available for both the Mac and Windows platforms, but can also be run on Unix-like platforms through the use of emulation software such as Wine. Dreamweaver is currently owned by Adobe Systems which purchased Macromedia in 2005.

1 Features
2 Problems with Windows Vista
3 Syntax highlighting
4 Versions
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Features

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. The most recent version of Dreamweaver (8) performs 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.

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. Alternative solutions for web database application development are Alpha Five and FileMaker.

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.

[edit] Problems with Windows Vista

Dreamweaver 8 is not fully compatible with the recently released Windows Vista, but is working fine for most people as of the 8.0.2 update. [2] The next version of Dreamweaver, part of Adobe Creative Suite 3, will fully support Vista. [3] Adobe has stated that it does not plan to update prior versions of its professional creative software to support Vista. [4]

[edit] Syntax highlighting

Dreamweaver MX 2004 running on Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger

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.

[edit] Versions

Dreamweaver 1.0 (Released December 1997; Dreamweaver 1.2 followed in March 1998)
Dreamweaver 2.0 (Released December 1998)
Dreamweaver 3.0 (Released December 1999)
Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0 (Released June 2000)
Dreamweaver 4.0 (Released December 2000)
Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 (Released December 2000)
Dreamweaver MX 6.0 (Released May 2002)
Dreamweaver MX 2004 (Released September 10, 2003)
Dreamweaver 8 (Released September 13, 2005)
Dreamweaver CS3 (Announced March 27, 2007)