The Unstoppable Rise Of Adobe Dreamweaver

I work for a company that runs Dreamweaver training courses and we find that there is no longer a typical user of this great web development program. Dreamweaver users now seem to come from all different types of company and from all walks of life: private individuals, financial people, marketing people, people in the health service, academicians It seems everyone needs to learn the basics of web development nowadays.

One thing is for certain, on our courses, we are now getting far more people learning Dreamweaver who are not and do not intend to become specialists in web development. They are, more typically, people who need to develop web content and who perceive Dreamweaver as the best program to use for the task in hand. Coming to this conclusion is almost inevitable since Dreamweaver is widely perceived as the software tool of choice for both the casual and professional web developer.

Dreamweaver has become the industry standard web development software, seeing off rivals like Microsoft FrontPage. And it deserves its position. It is a great software package with powerful features and an approachable interface which lets anybody who can use a computer embark on a basic software development project and, with a bit of patience and knowledge of a few fundamentals, bring it to a conclusion. Dreamweaver has attained this dominant position because its creators have always aimed to satisfy the needs of all the different types of users of their software.

In the early days of web development, there were two types of web development tool: those used by coders (the specialists who understood the technologies underlying web pages) and the visual software tools which functioned in a manner similar to word processing and page layout programs and were used by non-specialists and inexperienced web developers. The visual programs (which included Dreamweaver) had a very poor reputation among web professionals who found that the code produced by these programs was clumsy, verbose and inefficient.

While other programs such as FrontPage were content to generate code which contained a vast array of confusing proprietary elements which were not essential to the page, Macromedia were adding features to Dreamweaver which demonstrated their commitment to making it a serious web development tool. With each release of the program, they made the coding environment more complete, adding features such as line numbers, code-hints and colour-coding. They also added powerful utilities for checking and cleaning up the code generated visually and in other environments such as Microsoft Word.

Another important feature that has helped to mark out Dreamweaver as a serious web development tool is its inclusion of tools for generating dynamic server side content using industry standard scripting languages such as ASP and ColdFusion and, later, ASP.Net and PHP. This functionality was originally introduced in mid 2000 in a slightly more expensive edition of Dreamweaver called Dreamweaver UltraDev. The idea back then was that heavyweight web developers would buy UltraDev and lightweights would buy the standard edition of Dreamweaver. However, in 2002, Macromedia simply stopped making UltraDev and put all of its functionality into the much cheaper standard edition of Dreamweaver, making Dreamweaver the obvious choice for web developers of all types.

Macromedia also recognised that professional web developers often work in teams and added collaboration features to Dreamweaver which allow a group of people to work on the same web site without treading on each other's toes. They called the feature "File check in and check out". There also created a "design notes" facilities which allows members of development teams to attach notes to individual web pages for the information of the other team members.

The web is constantly evolving and new technologies are being developed to make web sites more appealing to visitors. The owners of Dreamweaver have always been very good at embracing these new technologies sooner rather than later. An illustration of this can be seen in the latest version of Dreamweaver which includes a series of CSS layouts which can be used by newbie web developers to create pages which separate web content from information relating to the styling of that content. Dreamweaver also has useful features for making it easy to make your content accessible to web surfers with disabilities.

The latest Dreamweaver also includes some groovy new features which embrace the Ajax technology using the Adobe's Spry Framework for Ajax, a library of automatically generated JavaScript code which allows the creation of interactive web page on which page content can be updated in response to user actions without the page having to be reloaded.

So, in short, Dreamweaver has all bases covered. Design-oriented web developers can use the program as a visual tool that generates reliable code. Experienced developers and programmers can work in code view and preview their work as required. Thus, the program makes web development approachable for just about any experienced computer user without dumbing down. This makes it deservedly the automatic choice for anyone who intends to become a web developer and needs a reliable software tool.

Article Source: http://www.articlesfeed.com

The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses in London and throughout the UK.

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