Free, an interview with Adobe's Kenneth Berger on what to expect from Dreamweaver CS3

DMXzone.com conducted a special interview with Kenneth Berger, the Product Manager for Adobe Dreamweaver. He will talk about the major highlights of Dreamweaver CS3.

One of the most important additions to Dreamweaver CS3 has been Spry, a new AJAX based framework that is built to work for both web designers and developers. Building on the patterns of HTML and CSS makes it familiar to web designers, but Spry also includes all the power web developers need to create complex dynamic interaction. Read on for an extract of the interview, you can read the complete interview in the April 2007 e-Magazine.

Overview

About Dreamweaver CS3

DMXzone: What are the highlits of Dreamweaver CS3?

Kenneth Berger: "One major highlight of Dreamweaver CS3 is how we’ve concentrated on solving some of the biggest workflow issues for web designers and developers. Working with customers has absolutely been a key component of this release was designed and developed.

For example, we’ve heard more and more from customers that they want to get started with Ajax—but there can be serious challenges in getting into Ajax development. While Ajax frameworks have dealt with many of the browser compatibility issues, they’ve also introduced their own complexities that make them difficult to learn and understand—especially for someone with more of a design background.

Since we couldn’t find a framework that fit our vision for simplicity and ease of use, we built our own: the Spry framework for Ajax, freely available now on labs.adobe.com. The Spry framework is built to work for both web designers and developers. Building on the patterns of HTML and CSS makes it familiar to web designers, but Spry also includes all the power web developers need to create complex dynamic interaction. While the code itself is easy to learn and use, the visual tools in Dreamweaver make that process even simpler. You can add widgets and visual effects with a few clicks of the mouse and drag and drop XML data right into your page.

Another major customer problem we’re solving with this release is making CSS work across browsers. We’ve heard time and again that web designers and developers are spending hours finding, identifying, and attempting to fix browser compatibility issues. Dreamweaver CS3 automatically detects code that will trigger rendering bugs in the major browsers, identifying the name of the issue and where in your code it’s being triggered. We also provide a link to the issue’s page on Adobe’s new CSS Advisor site: a free community-driven resource to find the latest information on how to identify and solve browser compatibility issues. This is really going to transform cross-browser development: what used to be a long drawn-out debugging process is now truly simple with Dreamweaver CS3.

The last highlight I would call out is Photoshop integration in Dreamweaver CS3. We know that web designers and developers often use Photoshop or Fireworks to create comps of web pages and then copy and paste pieces of them into Dreamweaver. Trouble is, right now it’s not as easy as copy and paste: it can be a many-stage process to select the piece you want, copy, create a new document, paste, save it out, set compression settings, etc. We knew we could make this important workflow more efficient.

With Dreamweaver and Photoshop CS3, now you can copy and paste directly between Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Simply choose your compression settings and file name, and the pasted image appears right at your insertion point in the document. Dreamweaver remembers the source file so you can easily open the original to make changes. Moving between Photoshop and Dreamweaver now couldn’t be quicker! In addition to copy and paste, you now can also import whole Photoshop documents directly into Dreamweaver—we read PSD files. And all these same workflows work for Fireworks as well, so we truly have an end-to-end solution for both of these key professional digital imaging applications."

About Spry

DMXzone: Is Spry cross browser compatible? Does spry prevent browser compatibility problems that for instance CSS has? (Other details are welcome too)

Kenneth Berger: "Yes, we support all the major browsers. All the code associated with the Spry framework (JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML) works across all the major browsers. Of course it’s possible to modify that code and create issues, but that’s what Browser Compatibility Check is for!"

DMXzone: What will be the future of Spry, do you have a long term planning?

Kenneth Berger: "In the near term, we expect to release support for JSON and XML upload sometime this Spring. While we certainly have plans of our own for Spry, we’re also very attuned to the needs of the community. When we set out to create a framework that worked for both designers and developers, we knew we couldn’t truly be successful until our community told us so—and that’s exactly what we’re hearing. The needs of the community of web designers and developers using Spry will continue to be our strongest inspiration in the future."

Read the complete interview in the April 2007 e-Magazine read more

DMXzone: Is Spry also meant as a basis to build upon for extension developers? If so, what do you expect from the extensions building community, what impact do you expect them to make?

Kenneth Berger: "Spry has been built to be extended from the beginning, as has the Spry support within Dreamweaver. We love the Dreamweaver’s extensibility community, and we think they’re going to be excited about the new tools to play with in Spry and Dreamweaver CS3. Their impact is up to them, but there’s a huge opportunity out there to extend Spry and Dreamweaver with new widgets and effects."

DMXzone: What are the best improvements of Dreamweaver CS3 for all the extension developers out there?

Kenneth Berger: "Most of the new capabilities in Dreamweaver CS3 offer significant opportunities for extension enthusiasts! I would encourage them to check out the Spry framework: you can create new Spry widgets and Spry effects and integrate them into Dreamweaver using the extensibility layer. See a browser issue on CSS Advisor that you’d like to see detected in Dreamweaver? You can write an extension to detect that issue and link to the appropriate page on CSS Advisor. Finally, while CSS Layouts offers the most common layouts seen on the web, there’s definitely an opportunity to extend that set even further."

We'd like to thank Kenneth Berger and Susan Paccinelli from Adobe who made this interview possible.

Read the complete interview in the April 2007 e-Magazine read more

Luba Sirakova

Luba SirakovaLuba Sirakova is happy to work as a Content Manager for Dynamic Zones – the company behind the zones network.

Luba graduated from Technical University Sofia with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer systems and technologies. Now she masters her Master`s in HR.

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