Brad Melendy

I’ve been trying about once a year for the last 4 years to switch away from Dreamweaver to Eclipse with the CFEclipse plugin. Each time, I always ended up going back to Dreamweaver because the Eclipse/CFEclipse combination just wasn’t able to replace DW for me. Finally though, I am happy to say that I have found the right free alternative to Dreamweaver in Aptana and CFClipse.

There were really only two things I needed to replace Dreamweaver, a CFML tag editor and the concept of a remote site like Dreamweaver has. Eclipse always had spotty FTP support that I could never get working. Not until Aptana 2.x did I find a version of Eclipse that had solid FTP support and the concept of a remote site that supported “upload on save”.

I’ve been using the combination of Aptana Studio and CFEclipse for about three months now and I really don’t miss Dreamweaver at all. Occasionally I wish I had a GUI display for editing like DW has, but that is very rare. In the end I’m very happy with my switch after having used Dreamweaver in various forms from UltraDev to CS4 over the last 8 years. If you are looking for a free option, Aptana and CFEclipse might be for you.

According to cnet news, Adobe has announced a release date of September 23rd.  I couldn’t find any press releases, but it looks like there won’t be long to wait for the final product if cnet is accurate.  The beta should still be good for 30 days after the release of the final product which I have been using solidly for the last week and a half.  So far it looks like I’ll be upgrading on the 23rd.

So the Dreamweaver CS4 beta is freely available at the time of this writing.  If you have a previous version of Dreamweaver, you can use the serial number to get a special BETA serial that will be good for up to 30 days AFTER CS4 is released.  I’ve been using CS4 for about 4 days now and I must say, I’m very happy with it.

You may have read my previous post regarding Dreamweaver CS3 and the terrible performance I have gotten from it.  It was so bad that I’ve never really gotten into CS3 or what it can do.  So far, I have had none of those problems with the BETA of CS4.  In fact, I’ve been using the BETA as my primary coding tool these last few days.

CS4 sports a new look, as did CS3.  Over the years, I found UltraDev to be quite different from previous versions, and then Dreamweaver MX and MX 2004 seemed pretty much the same.  CS3 had a new look but was still pretty close to the MX versions.  CS4 looks like alien software by comparison.  It also has so many default layouts that until you find what you want, it feels a little cumbersome.  In the end, I created a new workspace layout and named it “Brad”.  It is a cross between the Coder and Classic layouts and none of the default layouts completely matched what I was use to in Dreamweaver 8 or what was available in CS3.

Of the new features in CS4 my favorite are the addition of Adobe AIR Authoring and Subversion integration.  I recently got a copy of FLEX Builder and have been learning that, but before I wondered what I could use to do AIR development if I wasn’t already using FLEX?  Now you can use Dreamweaver.

As for Subversion integration, it isn’t as full featured as Subeclipse, but it is a welcome enhancement.  With CS4 behaving the way it has and basic Subversion support, I feel like I can continue using Dreamweaver. 

Did you know that the Coldfusion 8 extensions are not standard in Dreamweaver CS3? I didn’t until I noticed I didn’t get context sensitive help for the <CFZIP> tag. It just lie there grey and dead. However, it is easy to get up to date. You can download the extensions for CF 8 here and install them with the Extension Manager. This will provide support for all the new tags available in Coldfusion 8.

So I’ve been working with Dreamweaver as my primary coding tool since about 2002, back with it was UltraDev, however, things have changed for me with the release of Dreamweaver CS3.  The primary problem is the pure lack of performance and high cpu and memory utilization of CS3.  I’d also like to say that this has been happening to me for more than a year and on three different workstations and two different operating systems.  As an example, I can pretty much count on CS3 running up the CPU while doing nothing at all (see image below).

Why in the world is/has this been happening to me?  Multiple searches around the Internet will reveal others with similiar issues with CS3 as well as in Adobe’s own support forum.  Even so, Adobe has not identified this as a bug with Dreamweaver. There was one KB article that indicated antivirus might be slowing the product down as it scans the multitude of javascript files that Dreamweaver relies upon to do its work, however, excluding .js files from the resident scanner in AVG didn’t make any difference.  Also, why would this be a problem for CS3 and NOT for version 8 if that were truly the cause?

To make matters more strange, I can run Dreamweaver 8 perfectly on all three of my workstations without any issues, it is only CS3 that runs like molasis.  I’ve got two WinXP Pro workstations and a Windows Vista workstation and CS3 runs like a dog on each of them.  I should say that it runs in bursts of about 30 seconds where it is great, then bad, then great and then bad.  It makes the product entirely unusable.

So the end result for me is that I’m trying to make Eclipse work but I really like Dreamweaver.  But with only being able to use version 8, it makes it hard to continue down the Dreamweaver path.  I’m responsible for certifying new software for use by my team of five developers, and after a year of having CS3, we are all still using Dreamweaver 8.  I hate to make this into a huge gripe session but I’m just very let down by Adobe and it likely has cost them some regular Dreamweaver users.  The only thing that is keeping me from switching to CFEclipse is the lack of support for how Dreamweaver manages file check in/out with lock (.lck) files.  However, I’m working on a plugin that will duplicate that functionality and when that is done, it will be, “Goodbye Dreamweaver”.