Meeting the top man at Dreamweaver

One of the nice things about being an author of books about PHP and Dreamweaver is that I get an opportunity to talk directly to the software development team. Devin Fernandez, one of the Dreamweaver product managers, dropped into London today on his way from Adobe MAX to a meeting with the former InterAKT Team (now Adobe Systems Romania) in Bucharest. We met for lunch, and for several hours he gave me an exclusive insight into how he and Adobe see the future of the Web and Dreamweaver in particular. That’s the nice part… However, it goes without saying that he wouldn’t have told me anything if he knew I’d spill the beans in my blog. Still, there are things that I can say without breaking the confidential nature of our discussions.

A major focus at MAX in Chicago was on Adobe’s plans for Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). If you’re unfamiliar with these two, they’re at the forefront of what Adobe calls Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Flex is based on Flash and ActionScript, but makes it a lot easier for non-programmers to build highly interactive forms and online catalogues without the need for complex back-end programming. AIR is closely integrated with Flex and, in a nutshell, lets you build applications that run directly on the desktop outside a web browser. AIR applications are capable of communicating both with the local file system and with remote data sources across the internet. So for example, you can build simple widgets to display the local weather, or more sophisticated applications to search your hard drive for MP3 files and play your favourite music.

With all the razzmatazz surrounding Flex and AIR, not to mention a new project codenamed Thermo, you might be forgiven thinking that Dreamweaver’s days are over. Think again… Dreamweaver is Adobe’s flagship editor for (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which remain the core technologies underpinning most of the Web today, and which are unlikely to go away in a hurry. Devin estimates that there are perhaps as many as 4.5 million people using Dreamweaver in one way or another. They’re important to Adobe, and the Dreamweaver team is determined to keep the program fresh and vital to their needs.

The difficulty is how to do that. Dreamweaver users tend to fall into two broad categories with divergent interests and needs. On the one hand, there are individual developers and web designers, who either work entirely on their own or in small groups. They need Dreamweaver to perform a wide range of functions, and their priority is ease of use. On the other hand, Dreamweaver is also used by production studios, where a large team splits up the work according to each individual’s speciality. The specialists all want improvements in their own particular area. Programmers want better code hinting and introspection. Designers want better integration with Fireworks, Photoshop, and Illustrator. And everyone wants adherence to standards.

The impression I got from Devin is that the Dreamweaver team is aware of these demands, and has what it hopes will be some pleasant surprises up its sleeve when the wraps are finally taken off the next version of the program. When will that be? That’s always a secret that even authors aren’t let in on (which is why there’s often a delay of several months between a new version and the books to go with it). However, most software companies work on an 18- to 24-month development cycle, so I’m hoping that I’ve still got plenty of time before I need to start pounding away at the keyboard for my next Dreamweaver book.

One final thought… and something that might have slipped your notice in the coverage of MAX. Although much of the focus was on Flex, if you visit the AIR site on Adobe Labs, it says “Adobe AIR lets developers use their existing web development skills in HTML, Ajax, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich internet applications to the desktop”. Notice that: HTML and Ajax (JavaScript) are listed first, a sure sign that Dreamweaver’s unlikely to be put on the back burner for a very long time to come.

It was a glorious sunny day in central London—definitely something in the air to put a spring into my step.

2 comments October 5th, 2007