DreamWeaver intro

Adobe Dreamweaver is a web development application originally created by Macromedia.

Dreamweaver is available for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Recent versions have incorporated support for web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and server-side scripting languages like PHP.

Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in locally installed web browsers. Such as if you have installed Chrome, and Opera, and FireFox and IE, Dreamweaver can call and test websites from these browsers. Further more Adobe® has”Adobe BrowserLab” online service that helps ensure your web content displays as intended — by previewing web pages across multiple browsers and operating systems, navigate links, and use diagnostic tools to optimize websites efficiently.

In Dreamweaver CS5 you can check your HTML and CSS code W3C quality via the Site Validation toolbar. Also you can get the browser compatibility hints for your HTML & CSS code via Browser Compatibility toolbar.

Adobe Dreamweaver works as FTP (SFTP) client and it also can connect to databases successfully and works natively with XML, CSV, … datasets. It has excellent built in code search and replace functionality not only for static web sites but also for the dynamic web sites built in PHP, ASP, or CF.

Code coloring works like a charm for many programming languages.

There is also possible to set code coloring options.

Code hints (intellisense) works well for mayor languages too:

At the moment there are good news for PHP developers, but unfortunately DW CS5 is not PHP debugger, you cannot set breakpoints or so…

Also in DreamWeaver support for JQuery is excellent. It has been improved since DW CS4 and now w/o any JavaScript knowledge you can create JavaScript effects. DreamWeaver CS5 powerful module “Spry” is the Adobe intelligence that creates HTML+CSS+JavaScript for you.

DreamWeaver is powerful because it has great number of third-party “Extensions” for extending the core functionality. In general these extensions can:

• either improve DreamWeaver look and feel

• or for most web development tasks from simple rollover effects to full-featured shopping carts.

DreamWeaver supports Subversion (SVN) version control system. DW concurrent products are Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Web.