08.02.07
Should you upgrade to Dreamweaver CS3? Yes.
Dreamweaver CS3
Adobe recently released their CS3 suite, and we upgraded our installations of Dreamweaver around the office. Overall I really like the improvements that I see.
- Spry AJAX implementation
We have been experimenting we different AJAX libraries, including Prototype, script.aculo.us, and Spry. All of them have their pluses and minuses, but it is hard to argue with the seamless Spry integration that is in the new CS3 version. It makes implementing common AJAX implementations pretty much a drag-and-drop affair. We combined the use of Spry with some of our ColdFusion applications and the results are great. - XSLT and XML Parsing
It’s now much simpler to parse XML within the Dreamweaver environment, as you can browse the XML tree of any document, online or offline. This makes it much easier to syndicate content into your pages. One of the problems with using live XML, such as RSS feeds with this method is that you should plan to download the XML and parse it at at timed intervals if you expect your application to scale. For example, some sites limit the number of times a single IP address can reload a feed file. Slashdot and other sites do this. So if you had say 30 people or more hitting a news page that consumes a live feed, your server’s IP could be blocked. So you need to make an application page that consumes the feed, writes the files, then DW CS3 can aid you in parsing it, etc. - CSS
One of the features I was hoping to see, but it didn’t arrive, is the addition of site-wide design-time style sheets. I hate having to attach style sheets to each page as a “design-time” style sheet to see the styles in my pages. This probably isn’t an issue for developers that don’t use an application framework like Fusebox, but we do so it is an issue. It’s a minor thing, but it is annoying. Other than that, I really like that you can preview CSS for multiple devices, like handheld devices. There is also a new compatibility checker that lets you know if there will be a problem in rendering your CSS in different browsers. Dreamweaver CS3 also adds outlines and shadows to DIV layouts, which is helpful when you are designing complicated nested layouts with DIVs.
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