Re: FLASH: Flash + Dreamweaver Ultra Dev

[John Dowdell]

At 8:44 AM 10/19/0, Matt Spiegler wrote:

> We're thinking of getting UltraDev and are wondering if it

> makes Flash integration with back-end easier, harder,

> weirder, etc. I'd also be interested in hearing anything

> pro/con about UltraDev in general.


Well, they're a little orthogonal to each other... no direct connection, sorry.


UltraDev's goal is to make it easy to design with data-driven pages... you

can actually see live data delivered from the database as you're creating

the HTML page. It's the first (and only) visual editor for live data-driven

pages.


The previous alternative was to (a) do the HTML design while looking at

code in your page; (b) switch over to a browser or some other window to

preview; (c) switch back to doing visual editing with the codes; (d) switch

back to preview mode to see it with data; (e) repeat ad infinitum.


Dreamweaver UltraDev lets you size fields, style text and all the rest

while viewing the data in the page... it essentially does what the first

visual HTML editors did with static HTML. UltraDev lets you visually design

with live data.


UltraDev also includes server-side behaviors for common tasks, similar to

what Dreamweaver introduced with its JavaScript behaviors... if you're

doing complex work then you might want to add hand-written scripts, but the

majority of work can be done with the automated scripts. It also gives you

a single environment for creating sites to a variety of middleware,

leverages off the extensibility of the regular Dreamweaver platform, more.



As you can see from the above, Dreamweaver UltraDev produces an HTML page

with various scripts inside it. When viewed in a browser, the page will be

populated with data in realtime. UltraDev doesn't really accept triggers

from objects in the page, or make display changes to objects in the page.


That said, you *could* tap into UD's in-page functions through FSCommand,

but this relies on the browser to convey those commands. That's pretty much

the only way I see them working together, sorry.



What is it that you're trying to accomplish? Is this a Flash piece that

needs data-driven content? If so then we'd be looking to load data in

either URL-encoded or XML-formatted methods, or possibly creating a new SWF

at serving-time from Generator. A lot depends on the design goals and

current nature of the data, though. How far has this been defined yet...?


jd











John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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