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.
February 7th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Dude - tagging that post with “rihanna” was inspired.
February 7th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
As a designer who uses Dreamweaver every day and works closely with developers who prefer coding other applications, I totally understand why there is a beef with Dreamweaver. On the flip side though, Dreamweaver has come a long way in the past ten or so years and both me and my programmer pals are pretty impressed with how well it now handles PHP, ASP, JSP, JavaScript, etc. I’m happy to hear that it garnered 21% in that poll!
Cheers!
Sue Jenkins ~ Author of “Web Design: The L-Line” and “Dreamweaver For Dummies All-in-One Desk Reference” and Instructor in “Dreamweaver For Designers” DVD and the upcoming “Designer’s Guide to Photoshop” DVD
June 16th, 2009 at 1:07 am
I agree Dreamweaver may have its faults and I personally don’t use the built in javascript or php features but for design, CSS, site management etc it saves me a ton of time. I love it!
Billy Gee