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besson3c · Sep 13, 2009, 02:58 AM

I admit to being ignorant to much of the Adobe web offerings mostly because I've never been terribly compelled to become curious to learn more. I suspect that there are some loyal followers of the Adobe product line here, so I promise to be open-minded, sell me on all things Adobe!

I can't quite place the uses for many of their technologies, or know how I might benefit from learning more... Educate me while you're at it!

Up until this point my general take has been:

- Fireworks: don't really see the point

- Flash: can do some neat things, but it's a walled garden that is a PITA to work with and around. It is generally unpleasant to work in the IDE on the Mac, and in many areas were Flash has traditionally been used Javascript is a worthwhile replacement. There are also tons of really bad Flash sites out there, I have this great bias against Flash being sort of the exciting technology of the earlier part of this century, but mostly yesterday's news otherwise. I know that some people are still big into it though, and it is still taught at many schools. I'm also ignorant how Flash sites fare against HTML sites as far as search engine pagerankings?

- GoLive/Dreamweaver/Contribute: I don't believe in WYSIWYG editors to construct sites with, nor do I believe in static content, don't see the point in shelling out for an expensive text editor

- Spry: what will it do that Prototype/jQuery/YUI/etc. won't?

- Coldfusion: not attracted to a proprietary language for Windows

- Air: is this the successor to DIrector? I guess I can see how this might be cool for people that are already well entrenched in Adobe world and want to create a Desktop app?

- Flex: this interests me the most, although I'm not clear as to what sorts of things would be appropriate to use Flex for vs. Flash/Actionscript? What is the future of both Flash and Flex? How do the two complement each other? I do like the fact that it is open source...

Again, I admit being mostly ignorant here... Anybody care to help straighten me out?

turtle777 · Sep 13, 2009, 03:01 AM

Mostly, these are tools for people that are more designers than hard core coders.

Just IMO.

-t

tooki · Sep 13, 2009, 04:05 AM

Fireworks is a great program to design web graphics with, because you can see how it'll look as a low-res, compressed bitmap as you do it.

Flash... needs to die. Seldom does it improve a website, most of the time it just makes it suck. Flash ads should be outlawed.

GoLive is dead, it was killed well over a year ago because Dreamweaver is the stronger tool.

Dreamweaver is a website design program (note that I said website, not web page!). Hand-coding a site in DW can be a lot faster because of HTML and CSS tag and property autocompletion, but mostly, DW's ability to manage sites makes it valuable. For example, if you rename a file in your site, DW will automatically say "hey, do you wanna update the links to this in every other page?". Doing that manually is a HUGE waste of time. Note that almost nobody uses DW as a WYSIWYG editor -- that's not its strength. Instead, its user base tends to use it as an HTML-optimized code editor with live preview and excellent site management tools. And as for "static" sites: blogs and whatnot aren't static, but most corporate websites and intranets are static, with just a few dynamic elements where needed. Either way, DW can handle both.

DW with Contribute is good for situations where one person is the web designer, but someone else needs to be able to edit pages -- and you don't want that person to be able to bork up the whole site. It separates design from content so that the design is protected.

Coldfusion, I believe, is dynamic somethingoranother. Since it's not on Mac, I don't care.

Air and Flex I know nothing about.

besson3c · Sep 13, 2009, 01:11 PM

tooki: most corporate websites are static, as in not managed by a CMS? The popularity of the CMS is why I tend to think that a bunch of static pages is a dead concept, or at least dying. Without content that is structured you can't search for it, anybody that wants to edit it needs their own copy and understanding of Dreamweaver/Contribute, etc.

Chuckit · Sep 13, 2009, 01:33 PM

I'm a big supporter of static sites. In many cases, a CMS is nothing but a waste of time. Obviously we want generation for including sitewide menus and so on, but installing a whole server-side CMS for that is way overkill. If all you need to do is change some copy here and there and switch out a person's name on your org chart once in a while, simple HTML pages tax the server a lot less.

Also, the idea that HTML is less "structured" than the records generated by, say, Drupal seems odd to me. Does Google have difficulty indexing well-written HTML pages?

besson3c · 03:17 PM

I didn't mean "structured" as in the HTML content itself, but within the site itself. A bunch of loose HTML pages don't know anything about each other, whereas in a CMS you can establish relationships and allow for global searching or searching within subsections, easy URL changes, etc.

I suppose that static pages still have their use, but it is hard to recommend constructing a new site having substantial content that gets updated frequently based on static pages.

besson3c · Sep 13, 2009, 03:14 PM

Let me back off my hard "nobody should use Dreamweaver" stance if I'm giving that impression. I'm just not a big fan (yet) of Dreamweaver/Contribute, but I don't mean to sound dogmatic. I don't want this thread to turn into people having to defend their usage when I'm trying to be open and express genuine curiosity about the Adobe products. How about the other products? I'm particularly interested in Flex, for instance...

mduell · Sep 14, 2009, 07:03 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

- Flash: can do some neat things, but it's a walled garden that is a PITA to work with and around. It is generally unpleasant to work in the IDE on the Mac, and in many areas were Flash has traditionally been used Javascript is a worthwhile replacement.

Originally Posted by tooki

Flash... needs to die. Seldom does it improve a website, most of the time it just makes it suck. Flash ads should be outlawed.

Everybody likes to dump on flash (I agree it's overused and abused), but how else would you do this in a way that works in IE6-8, Fx2-3, O9-10, S3-4, and Chrome?

Originally Posted by tooki

Dreamweaver is a website design program (note that I said website, not web page!). Hand-coding a site in DW can be a lot faster because of HTML and CSS tag and property autocompletion, but mostly, DW's ability to manage sites makes it valuable. For example, if you rename a file in your site, DW will automatically say "hey, do you wanna update the links to this in every other page?". Doing that manually is a HUGE waste of time.

Really useful (assuming it's intelligent and not just doing a simple replacement) for non-dynamic sites.

Chuckit · Sep 14, 2009, 07:17 PM

I don't know what you mean by "not just doing a simple replacement". It isn't doesn't just grep for the filename and update it. IIRC, knows what files include src or href attributes that refer to the moved/renamed file and it updates them to point to the new location.

Veltliner · Sep 14, 2009, 07:50 PM

I just wonder who'd want to use Flash for interactive websites?

You can do most things in Javascript, and you can fall back on Javascript libraries. And Javascript and Flash's ActionScript are related anyway.

I'm currently learning Javascript, and wouldn't have even thought of learning Flash instead.

The only thing that Flash has an advantage over Javascript is probably animation. But I wonder if Javascript can't do that, too. Or if other applications wouldn't be more interesting to use, e.g. special effects software. I'd really be interested if any of you had experience in animation and could point out where Flash stands in this field.

Veltliner · Sep 14, 2009, 07:51 PM

PS: Fans of Adobe...

Do they exist?

(How about ufos?)

besson3c · Sep 14, 2009, 08:14 PM

Velt: aside from actual video, Flash is still a good way to handle complex animation.

I generally don't recommend excessive animation on a website though. To me, a lot of animation exists "because it can", but adds little as far as actual usability and communication. This is, in my opinion, not too dissimilar from some of the earlier versions of OS X that featured heavy shadows and other effects just because this was a new and exciting tool at the time.

It seems to me that animation serves two main purposes:

- to communicate and provide feedback
- to provide entertaining eye candy which adds to the overall user experience

I think Javascript handles the former well enough (and with better performance), and as far as user experience goes I generally suggest investing money in other things where a budget is limited. It is not at all uncommon to come across a site with a great Flash splash page, and the inner pages are all poorly designed HTML almost as if they were an afterthought. I'd rather build a site around a great design, great usability, great content, etc. rather than expensive Flash driven eye-candy.

Just my two cents...

Veltliner · Sep 15, 2009, 10:09 PM

Besson, I agree with keeping a website to its necessities, and style those that it gives a visitor a good, esthetic experience.

I don't like noisy websites, I'm more like form follows function. Apple's products follow this principle pretty well, and only PC fans call it "stylish".

I started learning Javascript for its functionality. If you want to show photography on the web, you can't do without. It's also harder to steal the images when they are embedded in Javascript.

shifuimam · Sep 15, 2009, 10:33 PM

Dreamweaver makes ColdFusion development infinitely faster than using a plain text editor. Hell, DW makes developing in any web language faster. Its tab completion is more fleshed-out and functional than any other text editing application I've used.

And, FWIW, ColdFusion is not a proprietary, Windows-only application server. There is a very fleshed out open-source CF application server called Railo that runs on any OS - Windows, Linux, OS X, and any UNIX-based OS (Solaris, etc.). It works with both Apache and IIS.

If you have never actually used CF, don' t knock it. It's an extremely fluid, functional, efficient language for rapidly developing data-driven websites and web applications. I can accomplish things in CF that would take twice as long (if not longer) to create in PHP, or even longer to develop in ASP.NET.

Like any web application language, CF has its weak points, but for what it's designed for (rapid, semi-object-oriented website development), it's fantastic. I hate developing in PHP now because of how time-consuming it is compared to ColdFusion.

besson3c · Sep 15, 2009, 11:28 PM

Shif: I think that in a sense, trying to "rank" these languages is somewhat futile. You say that you can work faster in ColdFusion than in PHP, but of course somebody who knows PHP better than you do is going to have different results. There are also several PHP toolkits out there, so all of these variables make it difficult to gauge which is the fastest and easiest. I think it is true that it is possible to make things simple and write great code in just about every language.

Also, according to the WIkipedia page on Railo (Railo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), this server translates the CFML into Java classes to run on a Java server. So, this does incur an overhead and may not be well suited for some apps. From this post:

Performance differences with ColdFusion working with Java objects - Railo | Google Groups

I was playing around with the following code this morning and I
noticed some pretty drastic differences in the performance of the code
on ColdFusion vs Railo.

On ColdFusion, ~325ms

On Railo, ~15000ms

I'm not saying that this means that Railo sucks or whatever, just that if you like CFML you are probably best off using Windows, from the looks of things. There is also the issue of finding a host that would offer Railo Server.

Chuckit · Sep 16, 2009, 01:36 AM

Originally Posted by shifuimam

Dreamweaver makes ColdFusion development infinitely faster than using a plain text editor. Hell, DW makes developing in any web language faster. Its tab completion is more fleshed-out and functional than any other text editing application I've used.

TextMate?

Originally Posted by shifuimam

If you have never actually used CF, don' t knock it. It's an extremely fluid, functional, efficient language for rapidly developing data-driven websites and web applications. I can accomplish things in CF that would take twice as long (if not longer) to create in PHP, or even longer to develop in ASP.NET.

Twice as fast as PHP? Surely it's not that slow going.

Originally Posted by besson3c

There is also the issue of finding a host that would offer Railo Server.

Shouldn't be that hard.

besson3c · Sep 16, 2009, 01:56 AM

Slicehost and Linode are not fair to put in your list since they do not provided shared hosting, but point taken with Dreamhost and Mediatemple, I stand corrected.

Chuckit · Sep 16, 2009, 02:08 AM

Actually, all of the pages I linked are virtual dedicated servers. My point is that you can pretty much install whatever you want on them.

besson3c · Sep 16, 2009, 02:14 AM

Of course you can, although I don't really get your point, but that's cool... If it's that I should have qualified what I said by stating a shared hosting provider, point taken.

tooki · Sep 16, 2009, 01:12 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

tooki: most corporate websites are static, as in not managed by a CMS? The popularity of the CMS is why I tend to think that a bunch of static pages is a dead concept, or at least dying. Without content that is structured you can't search for it, anybody that wants to edit it needs their own copy and understanding of Dreamweaver/Contribute, etc.

That's just not the reality of the web. Take Apple, for instance.

Apple is basically static. All the product pages are totally static, save for an embedded news ticker on the front page. Then support.apple.com and developer.apple.com are CMS-driven: they are libraries of articles. And finally, the forums and store are totally dynamic.

As for searchability... what? Huh? There's this thing called Google that lets you find many things. But seriously, you can have structure in a static site. If anything, they're easier to structure.

tooki · Sep 16, 2009, 01:17 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Everybody likes to dump on flash (I agree it's overused and abused), but how else would you do this in a way that works in IE6-8, Fx2-3, O9-10, S3-4, and Chrome?

Umm... as an animated GIF?
Or just design the site to not make you need to wait long. And if you consider what can be done with modern AJAX, a la Google Maps, I'm pretty confident Flash can be shown the door for many things. And once HTML5 hits the ground, with the lovely canvas element, Flash can be dispensed with once and for all.

Realistically, I recognize there are things Flash can do well. But those situations are exceedingly rare. Right now, probably 90% of the Flash that loads is banner ads and stupid background music players on MySpace and co. I can totally, TOTALLY live without those.

Originally Posted by mduell

Really useful (assuming it's intelligent and not just doing a simple replacement) for non-dynamic sites.

I'm not sure what you mean. Chuckit explains it pretty well.

besson3c · Sep 16, 2009, 02:21 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

That's just not the reality of the web. Take Apple, for instance.

Apple is basically static. All the product pages are totally static, save for an embedded news ticker on the front page. Then support.apple.com and developer.apple.com are CMS-driven: they are libraries of articles. And finally, the forums and store are totally dynamic.

As for searchability... what? Huh? There's this thing called Google that lets you find many things. But seriously, you can have structure in a static site. If anything, they're easier to structure.

I think we are on different pages as far as what constitutes dynamic vs. static. I admit, I'm not sure I'm using this language correctly, but what I mean to compare is straight HTML files that serve content that does not live in a database vs. content that does. Content that lives in a database is "structured" in the way I'm using that term, in that you can do datebasey things with it including search.

As per my besson3c definition (which might be wildly inaccurate), we don't know if Apple's product pages are dynamic or not, but I would guess that they are dynamic since search results include content on these pages, AFAIK.

Yes, you can index straight HTML files just as Google does, but then you have to parse these files and devise your search to pull out the content you care about. With a database it is much easier to separate the content from the template, to track the last updated date, to assign keywords to your page, etc.

mduell · Sep 16, 2009, 06:25 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

Umm... as an animated GIF?

Animated GIFs now support the first loop using different frames than the subsequent loops?

Originally Posted by tooki

Or just design the site to not make you need to wait long.

And while we're at it, why not prove P=NP?

Chuckit · Sep 16, 2009, 07:20 PM

Designing a site that doesn't take long to load in the average case is not NP-complete.

And Javascripting images is a problem that was solved in the mid-'90s.

besson3c · Sep 16, 2009, 08:45 PM

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why people rave about DW's tab autocomplete when this feature exists in other apps like Textmate and presumably others. It can't be that uncommon of a feature.

Yawn · Sep 17, 2009, 02:19 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

Or just design the site to not make you need to wait long.

Seconded. Half the time I tried to use that site it wasn't working. Pathetic beta quality site. But it comforts me to know that rather than make the site do what it's supposed to the designers have gone out of their way to make a Flash animation with an animated pseduo jet flying a graphic designer's imagination of a holding pattern. I feel much better seeing that. I'll stick to using other sites though. The ones that actually work. Thanks.

besson3c · Sep 17, 2009, 03:07 AM

Yawn: a slow database search is not always avoidable. There are a number of things that can be done to improve search times, but with a large enough database even on the fastest hardware and the best designed database searches are not instant. Everything has a cost. I can understand giving people a little eye candy to make this wait a little more tolerable.

This is not to say that their system is as optimized as can be, I just mean this in a very general way.