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!

Performance Improvements
So far I haven’t seen any huge performance improvements. I am testing on a better machine, so moving a little bit better. At least it isn’t wanting to constantly check the database, which it seemed to do randomly on any dynamic site before, so that is a plus. But overall, no huge jump…maybe they soon will let it be 64-bit and multi-core aware, LOL.

PHP Code Hinting/Additional Functions
This would be my biggest disappointment. DW8 didn’t have much help, that I found for PHP, beyond the basic server behaviors that it shipped with (which actually are very useful when getting started). CS4 doesn’t show a lot more server behaviors than DW8 did. Moreover, and this is where Aptana shines vis-a-vis Dreamweaver, is that if I had a function or class defined in another included file, I didn’t get any code hinting for that function. I got code hinting for pre-defined PHP functions, but again, that was in 8. Aptana will offer code completion for any class or function that I have defined in an include, which is a HUGE help.

CSS Improvements
The push for accessible, clean CSS and code has been a big area that DW has helped push the community in the right direction. Being able to see what CSS is acting on a class or a DIV is a big help in this version, esp. in Live View. That being said, I am disappointed that in Aptana I get code hinting that shows me what browsers a style will work in and even color examples. I hope that Adobe will continue to improve in this area.

Live View
I thought this would be my #1 new feature. Sadly, I am disappointed.

To me the whole point was not to have to round-trip to my testing server and upload and run the files at the server. I guess I thought maybe they were running a dev server on my machine or some other method. However, since to use Live View it still uploads the files, I can just go to the browser and refresh it. Especially since we have to test in what 5, 6, 7… browsers these days, I am going out there anyway, and using Firebug in Firefox for most testing. It is helpful to not have to go to the browser,  but still not what I expected or wanted.

Related Files
The other new feature they added, that is I have found enormously helpful is Related Files. When you open a page, it loads the referenced included files, any JavaScript pages, CSS or PHP pages. You can go back and forth among the other files right from your main page. This worked even when I opened a page on my hard drive, not in my site. With so many files being used to determine the final look and function of the page, this is a huge help. My only complaint so far is what I stated above, that I don’t get help with code completion from what I have in those related files, other than the CSS, which they have always done.

Other New/Improved Features
Unfortunately, I do my development one way, at least on my current projects. So I haven’t had time or ability to delve into any of the other new features.

I haven’t used any of the JavaScript frameworks, esp. Spry which come pre-loaded, but I know they mentioned some ability to add frameworks and it have code hinting. So far I haven’t used this to see what the improvements there are.

Also, I am not using Subversion, so that is not of value to me currently, besides I can do that in Eclipse if I wanted, for free.

After using for a few weeks, there are some nice improvements, but in my areas of concern, it is still not a big enough jump to justify the cost. I will probably continue to use DW8 for those times I need WYSIWIG and probably stick to Apatana for the better coding environment. I find it ironic in a way that the great thing about Dreamweaver was always my ability to code more pages, faster as a site grew, but with them all being so dynamic now, other tools have come out that are better suited for that purpose. I think DreamWeaver is still a good visual tool with some cool tips and development tools, but not what I would consider a full-featured development IDE.

Anyway, currently I am playing with tools in the Yahoo User Interface, some little JavaScript widgets that help give your sites a little more Web 2.0 interactive flair.  I am not doing anything complicated, but wish I knew JavaScript better, but with learning C#/ASP and the MS-SQL, MySQL and PHP work, I don’t know that my brain could take in anymore.

Of course, if the wonderful people at WordPress would put out a Rich Text Editor like the one embedded in this blog editor my life would be simpler. One of the reasons I am working with the YUI is that version 2.3 has a rich text editor. I have tested out quite a few and can’t seem to, at least easily, get the right set of options configured in any of them. So far, YUI’s Editor has been the easiest to configure, but still missing an image upload option (at least that I have found yet).

Lastly, while I took a break from coding, I was looking at the Iowa Straw Poll results. I find these to be great money makers for the party that holds it, but of limited real value. However, because the media places value on them, so do the candidates, or is that the other way around? Anyhow, after watching a video the other day from Mike Huckabee, I was very impressed to see his  second place win.

I went over to his site and thought it looked pretty cool and they already had a YouTube video up of post-Straw Poll spin, in about an hour, that is pretty good. What surprised me was that it was running ColdFusion. I have never done any Coldfusion, but what I have seen of Scorpio, ColdFusion 8 (which maybe out of beta now), Adobe hasn’t abandoned it, and with the help of BlueDragon, it might actually hold some developer mindshare.

On a personal note, I thought Huckabee to be a very articulate speaker and well-reasoned thinker. Plus, he has a good personal story with the weight loss and the Baptist preacher background. I will say the most ironic thing about him is that his sons, one of whom got arrested last year, are all still relatively large, and here the Governor lost all this weight and wrote a book on it. I am not really surprised about one son, as I met him back in my College Republican days and I think we all knew the only way he was involved with the CR’s was because of his dad, kinda reminded me of Tommy Boy.

So guess there are my random thoughts for Saturday…have a good rest of your weekend.

Anyhow, I did want to mention why I have been so busy and haven’t posted and also follow up on a previous post.

• First, the previous post about InstallShield and error 1327.  I was looking at the blog’s logs and have gotten a few hits to this post, so I must not be the only one having this issue. It continues to be a problem, and probably will be for a while, since people will use the version of InstallShield for a while, even after they come out with a new one that fixes the issue (which hopefully they will do soon). Of course, the new install pain is for Quicktime. I now have to register and then unregister VBscript.dll every time I load a new version, and Apple is aware of the issue, but of course they haven’t corrected it and you can’t blame this one Vista, you MS haters!

• Secondly, what I have been up to is working on learning Visual Studio at work so I can work on ASP to complement our new ERP program we have.  I have been doing PHP programming for a few years now, and have used Macromedia’s (nee’ Adobe) Dreamweaver for almost 10 years for all my design and development. So using a new IDE is a bit daunting, and interesting to read all the back and forth between the two and their camps. So far best I can determine is that Dreamweaver is not particularly ASP-friendly, but that VS is not a great designer interface.

But I guess both sides knew this, because Adobe hasn’t put a lot into ASP, I guess they figure if you are a MS shop, you will use VS. And Microsoft has answered the designer complaint with their Expression line, which I have only used to play with once. The crappy part for me, is that in my position, I will continue to have to use both, since MS doesn’t do PHP development (although they have opened up to do MySQL work) and Adobe hasn’t improved ASP support with CS3 from what I can tell.

I will be curious to see what VS 2008 has in it, since MS said Beta 2 that was released this week had some of the design and CSS improvements that came from the Expression Web product. Hopefully, I will know by the end of this week, since I actually think I have learned enough C# to actually do some real coding this week in ASP.