HomePHP Page 9 - Building PHP Applications With Macromedia Dreamweaver MX
I, Robot - PHP
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.
In addition to recordset bindings, Dreamweaver also makes it easy to create bindings to other variables - you can register variable names in the "Bindings" tab of the "Application" panel, and then simply drag and drop those variable names from the panel into the code editor wbenever you need to manipulate them; Dreamweaver automatically writes the PHP code to echo the current value of the variable to the standard output.
As an example, consider the following example, in which I've added three form variables, one session variable and one server variable to the Dreamweaver "Bindings" tab.
I can now access any of these variables in my PHP script simply by dragging them from the "Bindings" tab into the editor window - Dreamweaver automatically writes PHP code to echo() the current value of the variable to the screen.
If you're using a large number of common variables in different scripts within your applications - session variables are a good example - this drag-and-drop feature can save you a fair amount of repetitive typing. And that's always a Good Thing. Now if only Dreamweaver could automatically track variables as I created them and add them to the "Bindings" tab automatically, without me having to manually register them...