DreamWeaver MX Upgrade

by Macromedia

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces
• ASIN: B000066EUF
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 29, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #18,032 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX is a topflight Web editor for dynamic sites as well as static pages. Dreamweaver's excellent visual tools generate code that works across all the leading Web browsers, winning it the respect of professionals. Its availability on the Mac as well as Windows is another strong feature for designers. The product is also extensible, with a huge range of third-party add-ons available from Macromedia's Web site, many of them free of charge. There is great support for Internet standards, including cascading style sheets, XHTML, and accessibility features. Built-in validating mechanisms make it easy to check a page, and everything is highly configurable so you can specify the standards you want to support.

This is a visual editor, which means you can create and edit a Web page by selecting items such as tables, forms, and images from a tabbed palette. The Properties panel lets you specify details such as borders, styles, and hyperlinks, and you can also use the visual editor for frames and layers. Many designers also like to edit the underlying HTML, and this is where Dreamweaver MX comes into its own. It supports either a pure code view or a split view that lets you click seamlessly between the code and visual editors. A lot of the features previously found in HomeSite, Macromedia's text-based Web editor, are now integrated into Dreamweaver, including pop-up code hints, a snippets panel that lets you keep handy pieces of code for reuse, and a tag chooser that lets you grab the right tag from a list. An O'Reilly tag reference is built in.

Dreamweaver's template support deserves special mention. Templates give you a quick start with a number of predesigned pages. In Dreamweaver MX, they can also be used to lock down areas of the page, so that contributors can create and edit a story without disturbing the design. Templates can be nested so that changes to an underlying template ripple through the pages that use it for powerful site-wide updates.

Macromedia used to market a product called Dreamweaver UltraDev, which allowed for rapid development of Web applications featuring online databases, member login, and other server-side elements. In Dreamweaver MX, this capability is built in. It has also been extended, adding support for ASP.NET and PHP as well as ColdFusion, JavaServer pages, and traditional ASP. Nonspecialists will find themselves able to build rich dynamic pages, while the integrated code editor makes this a capable development product as well. In fact, Dreamweaver MX has also replaced ColdFusion Studio as the primary development tool for ColdFusion MX. It is a uniquely flexible package.

Overall, it's hard to find fault with Dreamweaver MX. It's true that its complexity and professional features make it harder to pick up than some rival products. The abundance of panels and options can be confusing, and a high-resolution screen is required. In addition, the Studio MX products, which include Dreamweaver, are a better value for those who need more than one of the MX series. However, this takes nothing away from the excellence of Dreamweaver as the first-choice tool for professionals. --Tim Anderson

Amazon.com Product Description

Build Web sites and Internet applications with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Work within one environment to easily create and manage any professional Web site, whether it's built using HTML, XHTML, XML, Web services, ColdFusion, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, or PHP. Dreamweaver MX is a complete solution combining the visual layout tools of Dreamweaver, the Web application features of Dreamweaver UltraDev, and the code editing support of HomeSite.

The new integrated workspace shared with Macromedia Flash MX and Fireworks MX includes tabbed document windows, dockable panel groups, customizable toolbars, and integrated file browsing. Prebuilt layouts and code, including site structures, forms, accessible templates, and JavaScript functions for interactivity, allow you to get started fast. A site setup wizard helps configure site information instantly for managing dynamic sites, staged sites, or sites hosted by ISPs.

Write code faster than ever before using features like code hints, tag editors, extensible color coding, tag choosers, snippets, and code validation. Accelerate development with support for XML, including creating, editing, validating XML code, and importing XML schemas. Easily introspect XML Web services. Ensure standards compliance with default creation of XHTML output, easy conversion from standard HTML to XHTML, and increased support for CSS2.

Note: This is an upgrade version for owners of Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver UltraDev, ColdFusion Studio 4.5 or later, or JRun Studio.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars much better than earlier versions, July 1, 2002

By	Jodawi (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

Earlier versions of DW were almost unusably buggy. Crashed every hour, and i'd discover new bugs every time i ran it. I'd report them and never see them listed as fixed bugs. Spent most of my time switching over to BBEdit to clean up the mess. This new version seems much less buggy so far - crashes are rare. (Of course that might be due in part to running it under OSX instead of OS9, but...) It still creates weird code at times, and has some other annoyances, but i have no serious complaints yet.