Dreamweaver MX and CF coding

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Dreamweaver MX and CF coding

• Presented ByEron CohenBrainbox Productions
• Ebc_at_brainbox.tv

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What well learn

• A quick introduction the MX product family
• A comparison of ColdFusion Studio and Dreamweaver
• How to set up a site in Dreamweaver MX
• The basics of using Dreamweaver MX
• The gems of using Dreamweaver MX to edit
  ColdFusion code

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What is MX?

• Dreamweaver MX is part of the MX product family.
  MX also includes
• HomeSite (ColdFusion Studio with minor changes)
• FireWorks MX
• FreeHand 10
• ColdFusion MX
• Flash MX
• Studio MX A suite of products which includes
  Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, Fireworks MX, Freehand
  10 and ColdFusion Developer Edition

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Dreamweaver MX Hardware Requirements

• Windows Platform Pentium II / 128 Megs of Ram
• Macintosh Platform G3 / OS 9 or OS 10 (HomeSite
  does not work on Mactinosh, but by the way,
  ColdFusion MX Does!)

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Dreamweaver MX vs. ColdFusion Studio

• ColdFusion Studio
• Only code view (Useless Design View)
• Fully featured code view
• Only basic integration with Dreamweaver
• Streamlined for editing code, requires less
  screen real estate
• Support for FTP and RDS. Some SourceSafe.
• Continued.

• DreamWeaver MX
• Has both WYSIWYG and code view
• Code view is not as feature rich as the one in
  Studio
• Round-trip editing and tie-ins with other
  Macromedia products
• Requires a lot of screen real estate for best use
• Support for FTP, RDS, WebDav and SourceSafe

WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed
Authoring and Versioning". HTTP protocol
extensions used edit and manage files on remote
web servers.
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Dreamweaver MX vs. ColdFusion Studio (Continued)

• DreamWeaver MX
• Many Wizards to make coding easier.
• Advanced support for Cascading Style Sheets, as
  well as other programming languages like ASP, JSP
  and PHP
• Runs on a Mac or Windows
• No AutoSave
• No Remote Search and Replace
• Erons Stability/Predictability rating 8.0

• ColdFusion Studio
• Some wizards, but not as complex or as useful as
  the ones in Dreamweaver
• Limited support for other languages, virtually no
  support for style sheets (Top Style Lite
  included)
• Runs only on Windows
• Has AutoSave
• Remote Search and replace via FTP and RDS
• Erons Stability/Predictability rating 9.0

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General Reasons NOT to upgrade from CF Studio to
Dreamweaver MX

• Cost
• ColdFusion Studio is more what you prefer
• You may have to get used to a new work flow
• Features from Studio which are not in
  Dreamweaver Autosave, Right-Click Menu features
  such as upper case, 80 column line, code
  templates with shortcut abbreviations, no
  control-shift-w to close all windows, no remote
  search and replace
• Dreamweaver MX can be a little quirky and
  sometimes the interface is slow.

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Reasons to upgrade from CF Studio to Dreamweaver
MX

• General interface of Dreamweaver MX is improved
  over ColdFusion Studio its more flexible, but at
  the same time does a pretty good job mimicking
  it.
• Innovative features, many improvements such as
  better database interactions and the ability to
  generate common HTML forms based on your database
  table.
• Many more ways to extend itadd behaviors, server
  models, extreme snippets
• Live Data viewawesome! (Like BROWSE in CF
  Studio, but better!)
• It appears to be the way Macromedia sees the
  future of the IDE.

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Standards Compatibility

• Dreamweaver MX tries very hard to generate only
  the most browser compatible code. The code it
  generates is clean, and easy to read.
• -HTML 3.2 or 4.0 (For DHTML)
• -JavaScript 1.0 or JavaScript 1.2
• Supports ASP, JSP, ASP.NET, PHP and ColdFusion
• For XML, it allows you to import Document Type
  Definitions (DTDs) and schemas and also to
  validate XML documents.

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Cost

• If you already own ColdFusion Studio or any
  version of Dreamweaver 4, your upgrade cost will
  be 199. If you have Dreamweaver UltraDev, you
  can get the entire Studio MX suite for 399.
• If you need to buy the full version of
  Dreamweaver MX, the cost is 399 ( Plus shipping
  if you get the boxed version.)

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A Word About HomeSite

• This is a slight upgrade from ColdFusion Studio
  5. New Features include
• Support for ColdFusion MX tags/functions
• A nifty file extension manager to allow you to
  better control over how different types of files
  are handled by HomeSite
• Ability to select always use binary transfer
  for FTP.
• Support for Fireworks by right clicking on the
  IMG tag.
• A few bug fixes here and there
• HomeSite is always included when you purchase
  Dreamweaver MX.

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Setting your sites on Dreamweaver

• One of the biggest sticking points for new users
  of Dreamweaver is the need to set up sites
• This is also one of the biggest complaints about
  the software from ColdFusion Studio users.
• When you set up a site, you specify the local
  server, the remote server and the testing server.
  
• There are two methods of setting up a site
  through the wizards or using normal dialog boxes.

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Editing your pages

• There are four views when editing design view,
  live data view, code view and split view.
• Demonstration of basic editing features
• Add a style sheet (Style Sheet view vs. Font
  view)
• Helpful hint use the tag selector!
• Help features use shift-f1 instead of f1 to get
  help with a tag. (No help for functions built-in!
  See Resources)

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Behaviors

• Great shortcuts for doing common tasks in
  JavaScript and server side languages such as
  ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, etc.
• Examples of Design behaviors include popup
  windows, image swaps, and popup menus.
• Examples of Server Behaviors include Inserting
  records into a database and recordset paging

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Using Bindings

• Bindings tell Dreamweaver MX where to find
  dynamic data
• When working with dynamic data, you create
  bindings either by simply writing your usual code
  or using bindings wizards
• An example of a binding is the Queryyou bind
  data from the database to a variable

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ColdFusion Specific Features

• Many useful ColdFusion-specific behaviors such as
  updating records, inserting records,
• Powerful support for exploring, building and
  using CFCs
• Support for RDS
• Toolbar shortcuts ala ColdFusion Studio
• Drag and drop support for SQL databases ala
  ColdFusion Studio
• The Application Tabgenerates data insert and
  update forms for you.

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What is Round Trip Editing?

• Round Trip Editing has to do with the tight
  integration between Dreamweaver and other MX
  products.
• One of the best examples is editing of slices and
  images used in Dreamweaver MX in FireWorks MX.

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Resources

• Macromedia.Com
• Download the trial version
• Help Forum
• http//webforums.macromedia.com/dreamweaver/
• Getting Started Tutorials
• http//www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/reso
  urces/get_started/tutorials/
• http//www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/pro
  ductinfo/tutorials/gettingstarted/
• Tip of the week highly recommended viewing from
  George Jardine. http//www.macromedia.com/desdev/t
  ip/archive.html
• Help for CF Functions
• http//www.dwteam.com/Tutorials/contexthelp