Dreamweaver CS4 as PHP IDE
As I recently Twittered, I am excitedly back into doing some web development. Currently, it is a final re-launch of the Pearson Funeral Home web site, that basically was designed 2 years ago, but never got launched, so now I am re-writing the code for it to be more secure and have more functionality, as I have learned a lot in the past 2 years.
Anyway, since Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is out, I thought I would try the trial and see if I thought it was worth the upgrade. The last version I bought was Studio 8 when it was still Macromedia. I hadn’t seen anything big in CS2 and/or CS3 to push me to upgrade the studio, other than the post-merger integration of Fireworks and PhotoShop…but that is another topic.
However, being a Dreamweaver user since version 2, in like 1997?, I wanted to give CS4 a try and see what they had added to make the case to upgrade.
The biggest improvements I wanted to see were better performance, better PHP code completion, CSS suggestion and I wanted to see how the Live View feature would work.
My basis of comparision, besides Dreamweaver 8, was Aptana, that I have been using inside Eclipse. It is NOT WYSIWIG, but has functioned well for code generation, and has a great price point..FREE!