Dreamweaver integration gaining steam? | February 6th, 2008
Dreamweaver tends to be an easy target to hate on. WYSIWYG editors are not favoured by developers, the code generated by DW is at times messy, and, in the bigger picture, DW tends to be perceived as more a tool for designers than for serious developers. But it’s surprisingly hard to reconcile those criticisms with polling data. Last July, Ajaxian ran a poll for their readers to choose between Dreamweaver, Eclipse (or a derivative), and a simple text editor (e.g. Textmate) and Dreamweaver garnered a solid 21%! And even in our own customer polls we see Dreamweaver score very high.
And despite the seemingly widespread ill will among developers towards Dreamweaver (depends who you ask, I guess), there’s been an effort to have Dreamweaver support the major javascript libraries (http://xtnd.us/). Maybe Dreamweaver is a guilty pleasure amongst developers; despised in public, lovingly caressed in private. Or maybe it’s ironic, like how indie hipsters love Rihanna.
I dunno! But if nothing else, I hope people quit it with the knee-jerk reactions! I have my own particular beefs with Dreamweaver, mind you, but it’s not hard to see its value.