Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
First developed in 1997 as a tool for the creation and simplified management of websites, Dreamweaver is now one of the best products that help professionals site designers at any level. Adobe is a tool designed for creating web pages What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG): this means the end user will have to worry just about writing text, inserting images and links without any knowledge of the html language.
The program is developed for different levels of knowledge and it is also possible to draft directly code, with a number of additional tools to aid the programmer. One such tool is for example an automatic list of tags, attributes and functions for HTML and classic javascript. The programmer can simply type the first letters of the tag or function and have different automatic proposals to choose between and thus can speed up the drafting of the code. Adobe Dreamweaver is developed with in mind a complete production system that includes both server-side scripts (Perl, ASP, PHP) and client side code as Javascript or Ajax. Dreamwaver does not forget the work of web artists either and facilitates the writing and management of CSS and XHTML for a proper and modern representation of its contents.
The product was developed and maintained by Macromedia, which in 2005 was acquired by Adobe becoming its subsidiary. Since then Dreamweaver (which was at version 8.0) had two further releases, the CS3 (2007) and CS4 (2008) that have added functionality (like support for Adobe Air and Smart Objects) and enhanced the user interface.
Among the most recent aspectd that Adobe has included in its top html editing product we can mention:
- Live View: with the introduction of a free and open (totally open source) engine WebKit it is now possible to work simultaneously on both the source code and with the preview. The immediate output is very effective, as can be testified by Safari and Adobe AIR users, which share the same advanced open source display engine.
- Code Hinting: introduced the AutoComplete function for the source code and support for many advanced features of Ajax: jQuery, Prototype and Spry.
- Subversion: full integration with the code revision system for code control.
- Integrated support for Adobe Air.
The advanced features of this program make Adobe stand in the Heaven of development tools, nothwithstanding the alternativ products in the market such as Nvu, Kompozer, Selida, HomeSite, SciTE, Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Expression Web.
The qualities for which the program is praised in many technical magazines are listed below:
- Ease of use: from novice to professional, everyone is capable to use this tool
- Power hidden behind a user-friendly interface
- Support for modern web technologies (Ajax, Air)
- Integrated FTP client for easy upload of the results on the remote site
- Convenient text editor that supports highlighting for many programming languages such as html, asp, php, perl, javascript
- Internationally renowned WYSIWYG Editor
- Project checks to detect possible errors in the code or in the links
- Internal validation of source code produced
Adobe Dreamweaver is therefore a very effective and complete software for professional development of web pages.