Re:Dreamweaver's more for coders than designers (Score 2, Interesting)

I totally hear where a lot of people are coming from on this issue.

What is the fate of Web 1.0 development tools in a Web 2.0 world?

The problem is that a lot of Web 2.0 goodness, such as Ajax, dynamic content, and collaboration require databases and dynamic coding. The static HTML produced by WYSIWYG web authoring tools can never meet the user expectations of today for a better web experience.

So you could argue that WYSIWYG development tools are obsolete, and that portals and content management systems are the future, but I would only partially agree. Sure, the web is changing, but that does not mean Web user interface design, navigation design, usability, accessibility, information architecture, CSS, HTML, Web standards compliance, metadata, and cross-browser compatibility are dead. On the contrary - I would argue that tools like Dreamweaver are indispensible for ensuring that Web 2.0 applications remain "backwards compatible" with Web 1.0 standards and guidelines. :-)

As users take on an increasing level of ownership of their content, we need web designers more than ever to help ensure the aesthetics and the semantics of the web do not suffer as a consequence (anyone remember GeoCities?). Dreamweaver happens to be an excellent tool for standards-based visual Web design and development. It makes it easy to create attractive pages that pass W3C compliance tests, and with the right Dreamweaver extensions you can build full-featured, Ajax-enabled, dynamic, collaborative Web 2.0 applications much more easily.

I spent years evaluating different open-source portals and CMS systems written in different languages (ASP, PHP, Perl, and Java), and I found that they all imposed certain user interface design constraints and even the best web-based WYSIWYG editor required was still a lot less powerful than Dreamweaver. The nice thing about Dreamweaver is you get complete freedom to develop your Web user interface however you choose, without any design constraints imposed on you.

But how do you get Web 2.0 support out of a Web 1.0 development tools? Remember Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme map?

The answer is components - rich, data-driven, Ajax-enabled, standards-compliant Web user interface components.

The component-based web development paradigm makes it easier to build content-driven, dynamic web applications with the latest Web 2.0 features. This is how desktop apps have been written for years, which is also consistent with the "Web as a platform" concept and the goal of making Web 2.0 applications more like desktop applications (that is, by building web applications the same way we build desktop software, we can make the web experience more like a desktop software experience).

Since I do mostly Java development today, I decided to learn JavaServer Faces, a component-based framework for building web apps. As a long-time Dreamweaver user, I also wanted to create my JSF pages in Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver had no built-in JSF support, so I decided to write JSFToolbox for Dreamweaver, a suite of design and coding Dreamweaver extensions that support JavaServer Faces development.

JSF is quite popular in the Java space today. We had our first conference last September. I spoke about using Dreamweaver for Web 2.0 development in my podcast from the conference - check it out if you like.

One of the great things about JSF is that you get Ajax support for free with a lot of UI components, so you can simply add a rich tree component to your page for example and you don't have to write a single line of JavaScript to get the partial page rendering behavior. Our tools allow you to create Ajax-enabled JSF pages in Dreamweaver both visually and intuitively. Personally I've designed and implemented many JSF Web 2.0 applications and Dreamweaver has always been a key tool in my toolbox.

Ian Hlavats
JSFToolbox for Dreamweaver