New Architect > Archives > 2000 > 08 > Programming Product Review

Design Tool for Programmers

By Ken Cox

When I started working with Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev, I felt as though the designers knew which features I wanted as a Web app developer. UltraDev is Macromedia's new cross-platform product that helps you develop server-side code and database-driven Web sites inside a single environment. An innovative feature called Live Data Preview lets you view database records and ASP values inside Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG environment.

I checked out the Windows 98/NT version of Dreamweaver UltraDev using Microsoft Internet Information Server and Active Server Pages (ASP). The software also supports Java Server Pages (JSP) and ColdFusion sites.

Start Editing

Although I use and appreciate a visual environment for Web design tasks, I can't stand tools that hinder my access to the source code, write incomprehensible script, or worse yet, alter code that I've written. Macromedia has done an excellent job keeping the code accessible. You can open its HTML inspector at any time and tweak your HTML markup by hand. The editor recognizes server-side code such as ASP's delimiters (<% and %>) and applies color-coding to distinguish script from regular HTML tags. When you return to the visual editor, an icon marks the location of inline ASP code that the editor can't render at design time.

Dreamweaver UltraDev Macromedia www.macromedia.c