Dreamweaver: what's the point?
I've been evaluating Dreamweaver MX 6.1 for 16 days now. I downloaded the 30-day trial, so I have 14 more days to figure this out. For a Java web application developer, what is the point of Dreamweaver?
I already have a couple of favorite code/text editors and access to simple Wysiwyg HTML editors like Mozilla Composer and Open Office, so I've got simple HTML editing pretty well covered. What I would like from a high end web application development tool like Dreamweaver is full Wysiwyg support for JSP, for custom JSP form tags like those in Struts, for page templating/layout systems like Struts Tiles, and for CSS-based layouts. So far, Dreamweaver has fallen short:
- Dreamweaver doesn't support Struts (or Webwork, I assume) custom JSP form tags. Sure, Dreamweaver supports custom JSP tags, but support only goes so far. You can use the taglib directive and you can place custom tags on the page, but they show up as invisible elements or tiny icons. So, if you are using the Struts form tags such as
<html:form>
,<html:text>
, and<html:submit>
instead of the standard HTML form tags, then your form will not look like a form in Dreamweaver. - Dreamweaver's support for CSS-based layouts support is a little flakey. Sites that look fine in MS Internet Explorer and Netscape7/Mozilla don't always look quite right in Dreamweaver. If you want to use Dreamweaver to design a site with CSS-based layout, then you are effectively adding a third browser to your support matrix. Not only do you have to make your pages pixel-perfect in IE and Netscape, now you have to please Dreamweaver's HTML renderer as well.
- Site template/layout frameworks like Struts Tiles (or Open Symphony Sitemesh, I assume) don't work well in Dreamweaver. The Struts Tiles tags don't show up in Dreamweaver, so there is no way to view your pages in the Dreamweaver design view.
In addition to HTML editing, Dreamweaver also supports multiple server technologies including JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, and ColdFusion. I would imagine that developing, maintaining, and supporting a full-featured HTML editor and web application development environment like Dreamweaver is a huge engineering effort. Maybe that explains why JSP support is so shallow.
I hope I am missing something here. If you find Dreamweaver MX useful for JSP development in this age of MVC frameworks like Struts, Webwork, and others, then I'd like to hear from you. Are there any Dreamweaver extensions that solve or help with some of the problems I mentioned above?
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