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. 
David,
Firstly, let me say how much I admire your work, and your books in particular. As a lifelong IT person from the late 60s (ouch) I’m truly amazed that a person with principally a BBC journalism background can achieve so much from a self-taught background, as far as I can see from your biographical blurb snippets. For myself, I know my limitations – one of them is being too assumptive about what I know – and I’m not half so surprised that someone like me with too long a career in IT management finds learning the skills my erstwhile charges had in spades rather slow, as you can see from my site.
I’ve noticed too the work of Flash masters like Brian Monnone and Philip Kerman, and as I have with you, I have paid them the sincere compliment of using some of their many ideas.
Here’s the rub. At the pace I am going, I’ll have to confound Gordon Brown’s hopes (if not expectations) of how long I might draw my pension to keep up with the successive Adobe releases! I’m getting comfortable with AS2, but don’t want to get left behind (old IT principle, don’t get ahead of the wave but don’t get too far behind) by ignoring AS3 or Flex. Ditto for Dreamweaver CS3.
On the broad front, would you recommend making the effort with CS3 etc, or wait until CS4 (you might lose the friendship of the “top man” I suppose if you would recommend waiting, so whisper…)
From a more detailed standpoint, is it too much to hope for an AS2 – AS3 converter to avoid going backwards before going forwards, or at least for a “code hinter” to help the transition?
Finally – now I’m warmed up – I have become reasonably comfortable with XML in Flash (thanks to Sas Jacobs’ great book) and I’m beginning to carry it over to Dreamweaver. But I know I’m going to have to move to fully dynamic sites and that’s why I find your PHP books for both Flash and Dreamweaver so helpful and stimulating.
My issue will be getting the MySQL database up to my hosting company’s site. Of course they support PHP and MySQL but while PHP-only material works fine (although I will need GD support and haven’t tried that yet) I haven’t been too successful in getting a simple story from them, having bought database hosting, on getting the database up there.
I guess there are as many variations on that as there are hosting companies, but is there a good place to go to get that generic story if not a very specific one?
Well, that’s it. I hope I haven’t breached the protocols about what to expect in a blog – I hope what I have asked is of more general interest. After all, while you mention the two types of communities using Dreamweaver as Web designers on the one hand and Graphics designers on the other (to paraphrase) there are going to be more and more “third way?” people like me for whom the better and better tools make it more possible to get engaged.
But vitally, of course, much more so with the fantastic help authors like you (and your publishers) provide with your timely, expert, readable and accurate publications.
How DO you write 500 – 1000 pages of such good stuff?! So often?
Very best regards,
Brian
Well, I’m very glad (and humbly sorry at the same) to time to report that having somewhat cheekily asked a techy question above, in the wrong thread, about uploading the MySQL parts of my site to my hosting service (php only stuff was already fine) after a bit of forum twiddling (not a great deal of help) and thought (always best to do that part first before asking!) I worked it out, but thought I’d offer the essentials here because I couldn’t find it distilled anywhere else. You might say that what follows below isn’t a distillation but then many Scots take a little water with even the best malts to help release the valued “esthersâ€. And I’m a Sassenach too…
As this is the wrong place, David (I’m sure it is) please throw away or add into a more findable location. All this relates to your excellent book PHP for DW8 and the seasons website you build there for the reader to follow.
First key thing was to export the local database (all tables chosen) using phpMyAdmin. I couldn’t get the command to complete when choosing “save to file” near the bottom of the page, so I just deselected that option and then copied and pasted the resulting textual version of the database that phpMyAdmin displays in a web page into a plain notepad text file. I was careful to choose MySQL4 compatibility mode in the drop down menu on the right because my hosting service is on v4, not v5 as I am locally, and you have highlighted in your books the need take care with that.
My hosting service offers what seems to be a standard “cPanel” for managing one’s hosting options. In the databases section, phpMyAdmin is also available from the database definition page. It is also clear on that page that the “virtual host” they make available is also called “localhost” helpfully (although it seems you can define others if need be) so I was pretty confident that the Apache/MySQL/phpMyAdmin setup described in your books and followed by me for my PC was going to match with no server model definition changes.
When I tried to define a new database called “seasons†in their cPanel database page, I saw that they insisted on naming it abcdef_seasons where abcdef was my cPanel and hosting site username. This is critical. There was no way I could avoid that – I guess it’s part of how they make sure the right client/customer gets the right virtual host.
Also, when I set up the usernames and passwords for this database, it similarly “pre-pended†my hosting username to the ones I tried to get it to set up as chosen in my local database, the query one and the admin one. This is also critical. There was no way to avoid these changes.
Then I went to their phpMyAdmin page from the database definition page, opened that new abcdef_seasons database (empty, of course) and headed for the “import†tab, where a very simple dialog offer the ability to browse to the text version of “seasons†I had created on my local machine (by export from phpMyAdmin as above) and hey presto, an identical version of the “seasons†database data popped up in abcdef_seasons with all the tables.
So far so good. The key step took me a while to work out. This was to look in the “Connections†folder (in my local root folder for the site) that Dreamweaver creates when the database connections are set up. In there were two files, one for each connection, the Query one and the Admin one.
What I realised was, rather than try to name or rename the database and usernames identically in the hosting servers, it was just necessary to redefine them in these connections definition files, and all the web pages would then go to (connect with) the right database and use the right username (and password) with the appropriate permissions. I had set these up in the cPanel, equivalent to “all†for admin and “select†only for query as on the local machine (but with those pre-pended abcdef names) – NB passwords are NOT pre-pended, they are identical
I kept the original local version of these two connection files for continuing local development and testing work, and saved the two amended versions with new names. I uploaded these new ones to the remote site (into the same Connections folder) and then changed the ORIGINALLY named ones there in the remote site to something else and renamed the new (remote) ones to the ORIGINAL names so the remote php and web pages would find the connections in the same (Connections) folder with the same filenames they expected.
I should be more trusting, I suppose, but I was AMAZED to find that when accessing the home page on the website it opened completely correctly instead of giving those depressing error messages about wrong username etc.
I suppose all this is explained somewhere that I have missed, or I should be more intelligent or have a friend who knows all this – but I wasn’t and didn’t! It seems so simple in retrospect (and of course now for any further sites I work on) but at the time it seemed very arcane!
I hope this might be of help to anyone who is struggling with this – I’ll look for somewhere more appropriate to put this post ïŠ but meanwhile at least it rounds off my query in this thread. I know it’s rather like the people who make up for arriving late at a party by leaving early, I’m offering the wrong thread question with a wrong thread answer…it doesn’t make it OK, does it!
With many thanks to you, David, for being my passport, through your books, into dynamic site construction,
Brian