Building PHP Applications With Macromedia Dreamweaver MX (
Page 1 of 10 )
Looking for a RAD tool to help you quickly and efficiently develop PHP-based
Web applications? Or just new to PHP and MySQL in general? You might want to spend
some time with Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia's latest revision of their venerable
HTML editor, which comes with some nifty new ideas designed to minimize hand-coding
of PHP scripts.You've already heard of Macromedia Flash, the de facto standard for high quality
Web animation. But Flash is not the only ace up Macromedia's sleeve - they've
got another winner in their hands with their HTML authoring tool, aptly named
Dreamweaver. The latest release of this product, recast as Dreamweaver MX, does
a lot more than just help you create HTML pages - it's now a full-featured rapid
application development (RAD) tool for Web developers, and it can substantially
reduce the time you spend coding ASP, JSP or PHP-based Web sites.
Most RAD tools include very limited support for PHP - which makes them unwelcome
visitors on my computer, since most of my work involves working with PHP and MySQL-based
sites. When I got my hands on Dreamweaver MX, though, I was impressed with its
feature set and capabilities. Sure, it didn't include *everything* on my wish
list...but it's clear that the guys at Macromedia have been thinking about the
problem, and have made a serious effort to address PHP in their tool.
Over the next few pages, I'll be exploring the new PHP functionality in Dreamweaver
MX, in the hope that you find it useful the next time you have a PHP project to
code. Come on in, and let's get going!
/ 32 
