*** From the Archives ***

This article is from October 6, 2000, and is no longer current.

Dreamweaver UltraDev: To Serve and Connect

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If you’re a Web designer who’s gazed longingly at fancy database-driven Web sites and then lamented your lack of programming skills, then Macromedia would like to have a word with you. The word is UltraDev, the new version of Dreamweaver that provides a simple dialog-driven interface for creating Web applications. With Dreamweaver UltraDev, you can create everything from simple flat database access to complex e-commerce apps, without having to learn Java or ColdFusion.

But UltraDev is for more than just the novice coder. Experienced developers will like UltraDev because it’s the only product on the market that allows for development of ASP (Active Server Pages), JSP (Java Server Pages), and ColdFusion applications. Developers who find themselves having to switch from tool to tool to support clients running different server apps should be thrilled to have so much support in one package.

In trying to create a product easy enough for novice designers but powerful enough for experienced developers, Macromedia has given itself a difficult task. Most users will probably agree, however, that the effort succeeded.

Beyond Skin Deep
At first glance, Dreamweaver UltraDev seems the same as Dreamweaver 3. But just under the surface of the nearly identical interface waits the server-oriented functionality formerly found in Macromedia’s Drumbeat 2000. As such it offers Drumbeat’s support for creating Active Server and Java Server Pages. To this, Macromedia has added support for Allaire’s CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language). In short, if you’re already familiar with Dreamweaver 3, you only need to learn a few new features in UltraDev.

Before you can begin creating an application in UltraDev, you’ll need to determine a few things about the database to which you’ll be connecting. First, you’ll need to find out what type of database server is being used, and then you’ll probably want to track down exactly what fields are relevant to your application.

Applications development begins in the new Data Bindings inspector that allows you to build a connection to an ADO (ActiveX Data Objects), JDBC (Java Database Connectivity), or ODBC (Open Database Connectivity)database. From the Data Bindings inspector you can easily specify fields, filters, sorts, and formats to create an SQL query and attach it to a field on your Web page.

What Macromedia has really done right, though, is include an interface to all of the underlying SQL and HTML scripts. This allows experienced programmers to easily write their own SQL statements by hand.

Once you’ve built your queries, you can use the program’s Server Behavior palette to access server-side functions such as updating a database or scrolling through records. Sporting the same interface as Dreamweaver 3’s JavaScript Behaviors palette, Server Behaviors should be a snap for anyone who has used Dreamweaver to create simple Java functions.

Developer Tools Well Developed
Macromedia has done an excellent job of creating a powerful development environment in UltraDev. In addition to providing editable access to all underlying code, UltraDev lets you work with live server links while you’re developing. So, if you’re designing a page and insert some fields, UltraDev will actually fill those fields with live data from your database server.

As with Dreamweaver 3, UltraDev is extensible through a new API that allows the creation of new Server Behaviors such as shopping carts. UltraDev ships with a rich assortment of basic extensions, and the Macromedia Exchange Web site hosts a vast library of freeware or shareware extensions, along with instructions for making the most of them and tutorials for creating your own. UltraDev is also extensible through the standard JavaScript API.

Macromedia has done a great job of providing a robust “round-trip” coding environment. Just as a visual HTML editor makes it possible to easily switch back and forth between raw HTML and WYSIWYG modes, UltraDev lets you freely switch between working in the program’s Server palettes and hard-coding your scripts.

It’s About Time!
It’s hard to believe that it’s taken this long for someone to develop an environment that can create cross-server applications. However, UltraDev is more than just a cross-server convenience: Its database tools are cleanly, intuitively designed and seamlessly integrated into the rest of the program, making complex application development pretty easy, even for non-programmers. Though experienced developers will be enticed by the lure of cross-platform development, in the end they’ll probably be more impressed by the quality of UltraDev’s development tools.

  • anonymous says:

    The review is compelling, but with Microsoft’s .NET strategy that integrates Visual InterDev (and ASP?) into the next Visual Studio set of languages (and kills InterDev in the process), woud I be buying something that may be obsolete as soon as next year?

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