March 7, 2009 - 8:10am
March 7, 2009 - 1:03pm
Dreamweaver's not to blame
I used to use Dreamweaver a lot during my first 5 years of web development, and used it with classic ASP and PHP web development work. The problems can only come when you use DW or similar to auto-generate code for you, but if you've hand coded everything, Dreamweaver has always been good at not trying to modify it (unlike the terrible MS Frontpage). Many people are still against WYSIWYG web editors, though, since they assume that (like Frontpage), they do try to modify your code.
The one thing you have to watch out for is non-ASCII (often invisible) characters. Copy / pasting code can sometimes lead to these being translated into other characters, that can cause problems for parsing software and web browsers. That can happen especially if you are reading in data files, and can be difficult to debug. This issue (but mainly the fact that DW now is very 'heavy' i.e. bloated and expensive for basic scripting) has led me to return to using an intelligent text editor (TextMate on the Mac) for most of my scripting.
Alan.
March 7, 2009 - 8:38pm
March 9, 2009 - 8:47am
March 10, 2009 - 10:20pm
Migrated away
Dreamweaver works for what it does. A lot of people have moved away because they believe the solutions they use are better. For example, I use advanced debugging and dreamweaver can't do that. Others prefer products like coda (from Panic).
Dreamweaver does work so don't let someone use it as a scape goat.
July 26, 2009 - 6:59pm
DW will do NO code
DW will do NO code corruption. It's not perfect, and I use it pretty much for straight code view, but it will not mess with code. He might have been referring to DW not being able to compile like Visual Basic does. I don't know...
Motto of .NET devs:
"You can have my Visual Basic, when you pry it from my cold dead fingers..." :)
They don't generally like Dreamweaver from my experience.
July 27, 2009 - 12:58am
Let them prove it
I used DW from UltraDev4 all the way to DW8. I stopped because it was getting bloated and too expensive, and I spend all my time in code (Aptana, for the last year or so).
DW *can* mess with your code. But only if you let it, by turning on code rewrite or code formatting (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/10.0_Using...). But that doesn't sound like your issue.
Oh, you want an example of how code formatting can break your code? OK... (this happens in Aptana, and I believe it happens in DW also)
In HTML, it's often nice to prettify your code by using lots of lines; eg
<?php
print get_content_ordered(array(
'content_type'=>'event', // Find Event items in the database
'sort_order'=>'desc',
'numitems'=>'5',
'ignore_no_data'=>'no',
'no_data_message'=>'No Event Items found.',
'debug'=>'no'));
?>Now format the source code. You'll get:
<?php
print get_content_ordered(array('content_type'=>'event',// Find Event items in the database 'sort_order'=>'desc', 'numitems'=>'5', 'ignore_no_data'=>'no', 'no_data_message'=>'No Event Items found.', 'debug'=>'no'));
?>Because code formatting put everything on one line, you've now lost most of your array definition because the single-line comment has been applied to everything behind it....
However, this is an edge case. If someone claims your code is being rewritten, ask them to prove it. I'd be pointing fingers at GoDaddy, but that's only because I'm biased against them!
Regards,
Pete.
OK, question time...I know everyone has their opinions about Mac vs PC, Coke vs Pepsi and so forth but as long as I've been doing web design this seems to be a new one for me.
In all my design work (both in my full time and personal web design) I use Dreamweaver...I've used it since v3. I'm primarily a PHP guy but I've done some Coldfusion and .NET (where I used both DW and MS Visual Web Dev Express (the free one). I currently use v8 at my job and MX 2004 at home.
A month or so ago I was chided for using Dreamweaver and was told, by a Windows Server guy, that Dreamweaver will corrupt my .NET code and cause problems, don't use it.
Today I'm having a problem with a PHP mail script (which really seems to be a problem with GoDaddy) and the posters of the help forums for the script, even the script author, says dont use dreamweaver as it will corrupt PHP code.
Again, in both cases, Dreamweaver was/is obviously not the problem...but is all this negativity toward Dreamweaver hype or reality? Personally I can't think of a problem I've ever had that wasn't attributed to a bad script or my own silly coding mistakes.
Anyone else ever had a problem with Dreamweaver corrupting code? Inquiring minds want to know! :-)
-Chris
Chris Cummings
Integrity Web Development
Chattanooga Web Service