Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is a proprietary web development tool developed by Adobe Systems. Dreamweaver was originally developed by Macromedia in 1997, and was maintained by them until Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005.

Adobe Dreamweaver is available for both OS X and Windows.

Following Adobe's acquisition of the Macromedia product suite, releases of Dreamweaver subsequent to version 8.0 have been more compliant with W3C standards. Recent versions have improved support for Web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP (ASP JavaScript, ASP VBScript, ASP.NET C#, ASP.NET VB), ColdFusion, Scriptlet, and PHP.

History
In October 1996, Macromedia decided to create a new web page editing tool. Kevin Lynch led the effort, spending several months assembling a small team and talking with web designers about the challenges they faced building web sites with the current set of tools. Based on this customer insight, Kevin wrote a document called the "19 Dreams," a collection of stories about what an ideal web editing tool would do. These dreams served as the vision for the tool, and the project was subsequently codenamed "Dreamweaver."

Just over a year later, in December 1997, Dreamweaver 1.0 was released.

Features
Adobe Dreamweaver is a web design and development application that provides a visual WYSIWYG editor (colloquially referred to as the Design view) and a code editor with standard features such as syntax highlighting, code completion, and code collapsing as well as more sophisticated features such as real-time syntax checking and code introspection for generating code hints to assist the user in writing code. The Design view facilitates rapid layout design and code generation as it allows users to quickly create and manipulate the layout of HTML elements. Dreamweaver features an integrated browser for previewing developed webpages in the program's own preview pane in addition to allowing content to be open in locally installed web browsers. It provides transfer and synchronization features, the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by search terms or regular expressions across the entire site, and a templating feature that allows single-source update of shared code and layout across entire sites without server-side includes or scripting. The behaviors panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge, and integration with Adobe's Spry Ajax framework offers easy access to dynamically-generated content and interfaces.

Dreamweaver can use third-party "Extensions" to extend core functionality of the application, which any web developer can write (largely in HTML and JavaScript). 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.

Dreamweaver, like other HTML editors, edits files locally then uploads them to the remote web server using FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV. Dreamweaver CS4 now supports the Subversion (SVN) version control system.

Syntax highlighting
As of version 5, Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting for the following languages out of the box:
 * ActionScript
 * Active Server Pages (ASP).
 * C#
 * Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
 * ColdFusion
 * EDML
 * Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)
 * Extensible Markup Language (XML)
 * Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
 * HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
 * Java
 * JavaScript
 * PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
 * Visual Basic (VB)
 * Visual Basic Script Edition (VBScript)
 * Wireless Markup Language (WML)

Support for ASP.NET and JavaServer Pages was dropped as of version CS5.

It is also possible for users to add their own language syntax highlighting. In addition, code completion is available for many of these languages.

Language availability
Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 is available in the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean (Windows only), Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Specific features for Arabic and Hebrew languages
The older Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 also features a Middle Eastern version that allows typing Arabic, Persian or Hebrew text (written from right to left) within the code view. Whether the text is fully Middle Eastern (written from right to left) or includes both English and Middle Eastern text (written left to right and right to left), it will be displayed properly.