As a staunch hand coder, I have honestly never been a major fan of the Dreamweavers and UltraDevs of the world. They have never been fast enough, the code has never been clean enough or laid out correctly, and the features and menus have always been far too cluttered and hard to use. Dreamweaver MX has changed my mind about many (but not all) of these concerns. Although I still prefer to write code myself, Dreamweaver offers a viable alternative.
MX on the sceneMacromedia's Dreamweaver has been a trusted standby for Web developers since 1997. The newest iteration lives up to that standard. And by making Dreamweaver part of the relatively new Studio MX, Macromedia clearly wants to provide a product that meets the needs of designers and developers. Macromedia has gone to great lengths to bring its products together into a single powerful suite of applications and servers. ColdFusion MX, the cornerstone of the MX platform, is the latest version of the popular Web application programming language. Dreamweaver is still very programming-language agnostic, but the latest version has stepped up with ColdFusion Focus, so you can incorporate ColdFusion code easily into your HTML pages. Studio MX integrates several of Macromedia's applications, including Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, Fireworks MX, Freehand 10, and ColdFusion MX. Because Dreamweaver MX works closely with other Studio MX applications, you can provide nearly seamless interaction between design, graphics creation, and back-end programming. Previous versions of Dreamweaver offered only HTML support, mixed with some light ColdFusion and some ASP. MX adds custom ASP.Net server controls. Now, the .Net developer doesn't need to worry about some of the complex plumbing behind certain ASP features and won't need to move to a more expensive development environment. Dreamweaver comes with many Java objects, making programming J2EE applications easier. Java tag libraries and beans are also supported. In addition, Dreamweaver MX supports PHP, a relatively new language gaining popularity in the open source community; many objects and behaviors are available right out of the box. Before the latest release, Macromedia offered two products, Dreamweaver and UltraDev. Now, it offers only MX. In fact, Macromedia consolidated several of its development tools into Dreamweaver MX, including ColdFusion Studio, UltraDev, and JRun Studio. Another tool, Homesite, is both gone and not gone. Homesite as it was in Version 5 is gone, Homesite+ now ships with Studio MX as an add-on application. The functionality is drastically scaled back and many earlier features are no longer available.
