Government Computer News
Web tools make an art of building your pages
All have strong selling points, but Dreamweaver has the best touch
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
BY STEVE GRAVES | SPECIAL TO GCN
Professional Web design and development tools these days must support not only Hypertext Markup Language but also Extensible Markup Language, Dynamic HTML, JavaScript, Visual Basic Script, Java applets and streaming multimedia.
 |
Previous versions of Adobe GoLive fell short of the enterprise mark. The code was bloated, and there was no way to preserve manual HTML coding. Layout was strictly grid-based, and database support was nonexistent.
Version 5.0 of GoLive does much better. Adobe touts its 360Code system, which preserves code formatting. An integrated editor handles multiple syntax coloring with tags for DHTML, XML and Active Server Pages. You wouldn’t want to work on an Allaire ColdFusion application with the GoLive editor, but you can integrate ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages and XML pages with confidence that the code will survive. And you can edit the source code view for on-the-fly changes. But Adobe has no JavaScript debugging and programming tools, nor does it directly support VBScript.
Complex and versatile
GoLive is more versatile and more complex than Dreamweaver UltraDev. GoLive uses 16 floating palettes and has at least two ways to perform any action. It takes quite a while to learn. I initially mistook the design tab for a knockoff of the NetObjects site design function. The handy tab lets you make new site prototypes or revamp existing sites by dragging and dropping templates, links and layouts. It supports multiple designs for single sites and shared design elements across multiple sites. Final designs can be checked into live sites or replaced at any time.
![1105 Government Information Group [valor]](/images/1105logo_website.gif "Government Computer News [valor]")
© 1996-2008 1105 Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
