Adobe and Ajax Development Tools

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DreamweaverAdobe is a tools company, that’s how we make most of our money. And usually we do an awesome job (ie Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc). But sometimes it seems like we don’t quite hit the mark. There’s a poll over at Ajaxian about whether or not Dreamweaver should be taken seriously by Ajax developers and the results so far are interesting. 21% of people (113 votes) use Dreamweaver. The majority use a simple text editor (43%) and 24% use some kind of Eclipse based tool.

Now with Adobe AIR, Ajax has become an area of focus for a lot of us. It’s good to see Dreamweaver continue to have a lot of traction on a site like Ajaxian, but the complains in the comments about design view show there is still some work to do. Expression Web is a phenomenal tool for Ajax development, so I hope the introduction of Microsoft puts the Dreamweaver team into high gear (but MSFT dropped the ball in not supporting PHP). We’ve also got JSEclipse sitting out there on labs, but I haven’t heard what we’re planning on doing with it. I used that tool before the company behind it was bought by Adobe, so I’d love to see it make a comeback and become an Eclipse-based product that Adobe could sell to Ajax developers.

[tags]Ajax, JSEclipse, Dreamweaver, Adobe[/tags]

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  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/sfegette Scott Fegette

    Hey, Ryan- from where I’m sitting there’s definitely a lot of commenters in that thread who haven’t used or evaluated a recent build of Dreamweaver. Code trust issues are largely a thing of the past (particularly if you’re a coder and truly care about your output), I use DW almost exclusively in code view myself. I’m not surprised at all to see the strong showing of DW in this poll, honestly- old preconceptions are hard to move past, but it seems they’re still in play amongst the purist hand-coder crowd, unfortunately.

  • Kevin Suttle

    What about the built-in Ajax Libraries in Aptana (jQuery, Ext, Scriptalicious)? It seems like you can do just about anything with Eclipse plug-ins these days although they too are just now getting around to supporting PHP. I don’t use Dreamweaver for anything more than it’s FTP abilities and a site manager really.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Scott, yeah, I love DW in code view mode. I haven’t even tried the new design mode much.

    Kevin, Aptana is great and that’s one of the reasons we’re working with them on AIR support. That’s what I’ve started to use as my primary Ajax-AIR development environment in fact.

  • Davo

    The fact that 43% use a simple text editor just boggles the mind – those people are not achieving their potential productivity, and there’s no way to argue to the contrary. I’m not trying to say that Dreamweaver or Eclipse is the answer to productivity gains, but in this day and age, there has to be a tool that will fit the individual.

    I think when Scott used the words “old preconceptions” he was 100% correct, but I’d expand on his thought to say that it’s not just towards Dreamweaver, but the concept of improving one’s own productivity, in general.

    Are these the same people that round on anything that’s not LAMP or open source (read: need to pay for)? Dismiss ColdFusion for being “too simplistic” (and yeah, have to pay for)?

    In this era of global competition, refusing to invest in one’s own productivity is a self imposed death sentence.

    Davo

  • Davo

    OK, did I just use the word “productivity” 4+ times in the one reply? Hmmm, time for me to look at my own….nah can’t say it again!

    :-p

  • mike chambers

    I think a lot of people use text editors because they are more lightweight than the more fuller featured competitors.

    A TextEditor does a few things, but does them very well. Because they are more focused, they are much more light weight, more responsive, and use less system resources.

    While something like Dreamweaver, or Aptana do much, much more, you take a resource and performance hit for all of that functionality. I personally use Coda, even though it doesnt have very deep code hinting or other features (although it does have very good site / ftp functionality). The main reason I use it is because it is lightweight, responsive, and loads quickly.

    my two cents worth…

    mike chambers

    mesh@adobe.com

  • http://www.bobjim.com Ryan Campbell

    I for one love the Spry framework and consider it an incredible leap forward when dealing with data in JavaScript. I stumbled upon it before Dreamweaver had any support for it and was amazed to see CS3 design view included Spry functionality. I to am a “built with notepad” web developer simply because in the past WYSIWYG editors created ugly html and all that mouse clicking just got in my way.

    The WYSIWYG editors of the past were thought to be used for newbies and non web professionals (Who can’t spot a FrontPage templated website). That bad taste they left in our mouths has stuck with everyone for a long time but I think it’s time to give them another chance.

  • http://www.flex-fanatic.com Chris Seahorn

    Personally I would be heading for Aptana before I would consider DW as it relates to Ajax so to me it’s not such a big deal the numbers are down for DW with that crowd.

    On the whole there will still be a large percentage of Flex/Flash/AIR users who focus on database driven code (and now add synchronization with AIR) and in that realm I’ve always felt DW leads the pack. I mainly deal with recordsets and server sides which have no visual represtation to view and like most here can’t remember the last time I had a need to work in anything but code view. I have friends who boast they do all their work in a texteditor but usually that gets a subdued mental “and where did you park your dinosaur” from those in close proximity. Site management, recordset handling, ftp, database connectivity and more are what keep a large percentage of traditional coders on the DW platform and why?…because it excels at it IMO. I can do without a lot of things in this world but Dreamweaver isn’t one of them :)

  • http://mobosplash.blogspot.com John Nicholas

    I agree with the earlier post that most of the critics in that ajaxian thread aren’t basing their opinions on real use of it but there are some serious weaknesses with DW.

    The biggest is the lack of support for version control. Without good support for that, especially Subversion, I expect to move more and more to Aptana. I still like quite a few features better in DW but Aptana is moving fast and gets to leverage other Eclipse plug-ins.

  • http://http253A252F252F8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2.com Hanna

    8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2%2Bfind%2Bmore%2Babout%2B%2B%255BURL%253D%2Bhttp%253A%252F%252F8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2.com.com%2B%255D8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2%2Bhere%255B%252FURL%255D%2B%2Babout%2B%2B%253Ca%2Bhref%253D%2Bhttp%253A%252F%252F8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2.com.net%2B%253E8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2%253C%252Fa%253E%2B%250A%2Bfind%2Bmore%2Babout%2B%2Bhttp%253A%252F%252F8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2.com.org%2B8ace23e822a2d79650d9719dd2503fd2%2Bhere%2B%250D%250AThanks%2Bso%2Bvery%2Bmuch%2Bfor%2Btaking%2Byour%2Btime%2Bto%2Bcreate%2Bthis%2Bvery%2Buseful%2Band%2Binformative%2Bsite.%2BI%2Bhave%2Blearned%2Ba%2Blot%2Bfrom%2Byour%2Bsite.%2BThanks%2521%2521

  • http://flashtechs.blogspot.com J.Mihai

    I used and I still use Dreamweaver when developing an aplication or a simple site. I have already made a blog post regarding this, giving details and reasons why I use Dreamweaver, even if I can do it without it. I think it saves me a lot of time. In the past ( around DW 4 ) I was creating websites using table really fast using this software, not to mention the fact that when I needed to edit the code, I had highlight on the possible error and autocomplete code. Lovely featured by all means.

    Anyway, now I use Dreamweaver 8 ( still ) as this is the only one I have acces at and its quite easy to create div with it and after to set the position to relative and to make some small changes. Voila! The design is ready. I create template so easy with it and I can code also for aplications, like php.

  • http://www.denemochives.com Jim Madsen

    Well I am big fan of DreamWeaver since I started my first site. It was an awful site at the end but i liked Dreamweaver and how you can check immediately after writing the code how the site looks. It was great for an unexperienced coder like myself. As time went by, I used also other applications but Dreamweaver is the best if you have time to discover all its features and tools. One of the best and easy to use applications ever when it comes to coding. A 10+ from me. :)