In the tenth major version of any professional application, most of the basics are already taken care of. So it is with Dreamweaver CS4. This version successfully continues Dreamweaver’s movement toward building properly structured, standards-compliant Web sites. Whether you’re a designer or a Web programmer, Dreamweaver CS4 makes it easier to work with today’s sites, split up as they are between HTML, CSS, and script files. Add tighter integration with Photoshop for creating Web graphics, and this is an upgrade worth paying for.
To run Dreamweaver CS4, you’ll need Windows XP SP2 or Vista, or Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later. On the Mac, you’ll also require a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based Macintosh. I installed Dreamweaver CS4 as part of the CS4 Master Collection package on Macintosh and as a standalone program on Windows. Installation on the Mac took a long time (almost an hour), as is now familiar when installing an Adobe suite. Windows installation took much less time because there was so much less to install.
Dreamweaver has long had the ability to interface with a server-side database to create dynamic Web sites, but this requires serious database and programming knowledge.
Dreamweaver CS4’s new HTML data set feature allows you to store your data in a standard HTML table, a series of div tags, or an unordered list. Through a wizard, you integrate the data into a dynamic table that’s displayed using the Spry framework for Ajax. Spry is Adobe’s JavaScript and CSS library that lets you place user interface elements or effects on your Dreamweaver pages. The wizard gives you several options for displaying the data, and when users load your page, they can interact with the page to sort or display detailed information, drawn on the fly from the data document.
The cool thing about the HTML data set is that other people without layout skills can update the data document. Thanks to the dynamic page generated by Spry, the results will still look good.
One interesting development that appeared after Dreamweaver shipped was the availability of widgets from other JavaScript frameworks on the Adobe Exchange Web site, including widgets based on Yahoo Interface Library (YUI), jQuery, and MooTools. This indicates that Adobe wants to give Dreamweaver users access to the fruits of other developer’s labors. Previously, if you wanted to take advantage of any JavaScript framework other than Spry, you needed to integrate it in Dreamweaver’s Code View. Now, you can do it without needing to dig into the code; after you install third-party widgets with the included Extension Manager, they appear in Dreamweaver’s Insert panel.