So far I have read reviews and heard of some of the new features of Dreamweaver CS4 and I must say they are cool, but they still do not meet the expectations I had for it. Personally I have used earlier versions of Dreamweaver and demos of current versions and one thing I believe the software lacks (which others have done so well the incorporate) is a good code editor.
The current Dreamweaver code editor has remained much the same since version 8 and at that point it was lacking in “intellisense” (hope that is the right spelling). The Dreamweaver code completion features are not as adequate as they ought to be. Currently, code completion for HTML and CSS is fair enough, however, Javascript, PHP and other server side languages is still lacking massively. They thing I hate the most is that when I’ve coding a piece of Javascript in a PHP document, and I hit CTRL + SPACE to get the code completion menu, I’m giving the menu for PHP and nothing for Javascript. I guess I could say then that, it is more of a lack of code completion for Javascript than much else that is missing in Dreamweaver.
I’m yet to test out the new features in CS4 but I guessing much hasn’t changed since I have not seen any reviews about changes in the code editor. There are a lot cool features for CS4 like improved Live Editing and extra Spry framework features. I hoping for the best in CS5, because I also use Netbean (6.1 currently) and I must say coding in that environment is more than decent. All the best to Adobe, and let’s see if things change in that direction.
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