Macromedia Dreamweaver

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Macromedia Dreamweaver is a powerful and very popular web development program. Dreamweaver was originally created as a simple WYSIWYG HTML editor by Macromedia (now Adobe), but it later evolved into a complete web development solution, supporting just about every important web technology.

Dreamweaver was developed for Mac OS and Windows, but it does run (although not as reliable, in general) on Unix-like operating systems through Wine. Nevertheless, it is one of the most popular web development tools.

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Features

Dreamweaver features two main editing modes:

  • A true WYSIWYG mode, on which the user can manipulate elements in a typical WYSIWYG manner. This has received a significant amount of criticism due to the poor quality of the generated code. It was also described as "evil" by some web developers, due to the way it eases up the creation of table-based layouts. Efforts have been made to improve that though, and, with the better CSS support implemented in the latest versions, this is no longer a great concern.
  • A non-WYSIWYG mode with optional preview through an embedded rendering engine. This is supported by an advanced editor with syntax highlighting and by a very quick rendering engine.

Dreamweaver provides complete support for the most important technologies at the moment. Easy to use dynamic content creation tools are available as well, allowing the user to connect to MySQL or MS Access databases, and providing complete PHP, CF, ASP and ASP.NET support. It also includes support for powerful interaction with other Macromedia tools, like Flash and Fireworks, integrating it perfectly into the development suite.

Dreamweaver's architecture is very powerful and extensible, allowing so-called "Extensions" to be written. Extensions are actually code snippets that extend Dreamweaver's functionality in many ways.

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