Description:
Studio MX is the ideal bundle for professional Web designers, bringing together Dreamweaver MX for page design, Flash MX for animation and interactivity, and Fireworks MX for editing and optimizing graphics. Users also receive FreeHand 10, a full-featured vector image editor, and ColdFusion MX for dynamic Web applications. As for the quality of the individual products, Macromedia proves yet again why the company continues to earn the highest praise in its field of expertise. Dreamweaver MX is a visual Web editor that generates highly compatible code while also including useful site-management features. Flash MX is the de facto standard for Web animation, containing rich multimedia content in remarkably compact files. Fireworks is a great tool for putting the finishing touches on existing graphics, adding text effects or other elements, and optimizing the results for Web display. These three are the core Studio MX products, and the suite offers excellent value for these alone. Integration between the individual products is generally very good. It begins with the interface, which uses common elements such as dockable, collapsible panels and a dynamic property inspector, so that you can switch comfortably between products. On a technical level, the key feature is roundtrip support. You can embed Fireworks graphics and Flash movies in Dreamweaver pages without losing any information, letting you later reopen an element in its original application with all its features intact. The MX range differs from earlier Macromedia products by targeting application development as well as design. The user will need to build on a Web application server, such as the bundled ColdFusion MX or another supported platform, including ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, or any Java Enterprise Edition server. You can connect to databases through JDBC, OLE DB, or .NET data providers, depending on the server platform you're using. Dreamweaver MX is more developer-friendly than previous versions, with an enhanced code editor incorporating many of the features of HomeSite, Macromedia's code-centric Web page designer. Although ColdFusion MX has its own tag language (ColdFusion Markup Language), it generates Java code that can be deployed on any of the leading Java application servers. This also enables Java developers to extend ColdFusion with custom tags and components. In effect, the combination of Dreamweaver and ColdFusion provides an easy path into dynamic, Java-based Web development. As an alternative to ColdFusion, support for Microsoft .NET is a little less comprehensive, but still good, and includes visual designers for the key ASP.NET server-side controls. Application development is not just a matter of server-side scripting. Flash MX also has potential as a rich client, with an interface driven by embedded JavaScript. Through a technology called Flash Remoting, Flash MX offers support for Web services. The Studio bundle makes it relatively easy to set up ColdFusion to supply these services and for Flash to consume them. While it may seem strange to think of Flash as a rich client moving beyond the Web page, it does make some sense when you consider that it is cross-platform and very widely deployed. In addition, ColdFusion itself can consume Web services hosted on other platforms. Taking everything together, Studio MX is an essential development tool for ColdFusion, as well as a great bundle for any Web designer. --Tim Anderson
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