January Sonoma County Web Development SIG Presentation - Creating a Dynamic Application in Dreamweaver MX with Matt Brown - From the SIG announcement
We're pleased to say that the January Sonoma County Web Developers SIG event was well attended. Matt Brown, Community Manager for Macromedia, treated an enthusiastic audience to an informative and entertaining presentation, providing a solid overview of the new Dreamweaver MX interface and its powerful dynamic data features.
For Windows users, the new Dreamweaver MX interface will look familiar. (For those of you who like the old Dreamweaver 4 interface just the way it is…thank you very much…you'll have an opportunity to choose which interface display you prefer when you install Dreamweaver MX, and you can change the display in the Preferences panel at any time.) The new interface is not available to Macintosh users at this time.
Matt began by reviewing several familiar Dreamweaver features, and pointing out new ones. He described the Assets panel as the core of where work gets done, and reminded the audience of the usefulness of the History panel. The new tool bar is designed for "one click" efficiency, and you can now switch from regular tags to CSS with a single click in the Property Inspector. Most significantly, the new MX version includes an Application panel that houses the dynamic data features of Dreamweaver MX.
The bulk of the presentation was a demonstration of Dreamweaver MX's capacity for developing dynamic web pages. After describing a static web page as “a nest of errors and a pit of vipers” (to the amusement of those in attendance), Matt offered his opinion that for the most part, all web pages should be dynamic with databases feeding the required information into templates. (It’s been said that all of Amazon.com’s pages are created using only 13 templates.)
Using ColdFusion, which comes bundled with Dreamweaver MX, Matt created an application linking a dynamic web page to a database. The appreciative audience responded with “oohs” and “aahs” as Matt easily displayed and edited records using the new tools available in the Dreamweaver MX Application panel. Although you can use other scripting languages such as PHP and ASP, ColdFusion, is noted for it’s ease of use, and doesn't’t require extensive programming expertise to create dynamic web pages. Getting started is as easy as opening a new document, choosing Dynamic Page from the document Category options and ColdFusion from the Dynamic Page options.
Matt wrapped up his presentation with a demonstration of how to sort records in a dynamic page created in Dreamweaver MX using PHP. To his chagrin (and the audience’s appreciation), it took several attempts, and some help from those in attendance before he could get wrestle the code into submission, confirming that programming in groups is a good thing. [matt adds... never wing it in a demo... LOL]
For help getting started using Dreamweaver MX and its powerful dynamic data features, and for more in-depth explanations of how to use the ColdFusion development environment, we’ve included the resources Matt referred to throughout the presentation
[matt adds.... ] I am available for parties...
9:33:14 AM
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