Tim Flight

Yesterday I had the opportunity to play around with a copy of Dreamweaver on a friend’s computer. Mainly I wanted to play around with the PHP/MySQL integration and see if I could develop a web-app via WYSIWYG. I didn’t hold high expectations.

If you want to learn PHP/MySQL, this isn’t the way to do it. Without a background in PHP/MySQL the learning curve to develop a simple web-app would have been difficult at best. The code it produced wasn’t even close to the way I would have written it, but it did work.

So why use it all? Well it was speedy. Once I figured out how to connect all of the dots developing a simple web-app was quite quick. If you are going beyond typical add records, update records, delete records you will probably need to code by hand.

But this software might actually fill a spot in my applications folder in the future. I was able to build up a simple application for users to submit or update records, and have an admin approve new records and changes as well as deleting records. With Dreamweaver I was able to do this in less time than I could have by hand.

If the application was something likely to be upgraded with functionality in the future, I probably wouldn’t use Dreamweaver. If I couldn’t add the functionality within Dreamweaver then dissecting the code to provide the necessary upgrades wouldn’t make it worthwile.

However if I need to build a quick app that likely won’t be upgraded then I might just consider using Dreamweaver for the project. I’m shocked I’m saying that, but it is true.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Computer Technology, Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.