Coding tools
June 13th, 2000 by Liss
Dreamweaver UltraDev: next great time-saving tool, or time-wasting PITA? Opinions? I’m not entirely sure yet. It seems to have promise, especially for some people on our team who aren’t ready for hand-coding ASP and for times when faster the most important factor, but I’m not exactly thrilled with the code it generates. I’ll need to spend some time looking at how much I can customise the generated VBScript; don’t even talk to me about the server-side JavaScript it generated on the test pass of that code. Nightmare city, just like the “behaviors” I hate so much.
I’d love to see some real competition - not to mention really robust products - in the automated scripting arena. Visual InterDev is a beast (consider the source) with too much crap I don’t need (surprise!). Adobe took GoLive and didn’t make it any better, though now they’ve added “Dynamic Link”, which I’ve yet to see actually work. At this point, Macromedia is the winner through mindshare alone. Not that Dreamweaver is a bad product - far from it - but I really wish there were some decent competition. Free market economy and all that.