Adobe Dreamweaver is a web development application originally created by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005.

Dreamweaver is available for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Recent versions have incorporated support for web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages, and PHP.

Features

As a WYSIWYG Presto-based editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-coders to create web pages and sites. A professional criticism of this approach is that it produces HTML pages whose file size and amount of HTML code is much larger than they should be, that can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards, though this has improved considerably in recent versions. Dreamweaver 8.0 (the version prior to the recently released 9.0 within CS3) performed poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Macromedia has increased the support for CSS and other ways to lay out a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Retail box

Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in many browsers, provided that they are installed on their computer. It also has some site management tools, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters specified across the entire site, and a templatization feature for creating multiple pages with similar structures. The behaviors panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge.

Dreamweaver can use "Extensions" - small programs, which any web developer can write (typically in HTML and JavaScript). Extensions provide added functionality to the software for whoever wants to download and install them. Dreamweaver is supported by a large community of extension developers who make extensions available (both commercial and free) for most web development tasks from simple rollover effects to full-featured shopping carts.

Like other HTML editors, Dreamweaver edits files locally, then uploads all edited files to the remote web server using FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV .

The easiest way to build a professional website using Dreamweaver software is by using the Layout functions, it is very easy to organize the web page just using the Layout option provided by Dreamweaver.

Syntax highlighting

Dreamweaver MX 2004 running on Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger

As of version 6, Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting for the following languages out of the box:

ActionScript

Active Server Pages (ASP)

ASP.NET

C#

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

ColdFusion

EDML

Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)

Extensible Markup Language (XML)

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)

Java

JavaScript

JavaServer Pages (JSP)

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)

Visual Basic (VB)

Visual Basic Script Edition (VBScript)

Wireless Markup Language (WML)

It is also possible to add your own language syntax highlighting to its repertoire.

In addition, code completion is available for many of these languages.

Version history

Dreamweaver 1.0 (Released December 1997)

Dreamweaver 1.2 (Followed in March 1998)

Dreamweaver 2.0 (Released December 1998)

Dreamweaver 3.0 (Released December 1999)

Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0 (Released June 2000)

Dreamweaver 4.0 (Released December 2000)

Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 (Released December 2000)

Dreamweaver MX (Released May 29, 2002. Version 6.0)

Dreamweaver MX 2004 (Released September 10, 2003. Version 7.0)

Dreamweaver 8 (Released September 13, 2005)

Dreamweaver CS3 (Released April 16, 2007. Version 9.0)