Chapter 9. Coding with Classes and Libraries

Dreamweaver ships with a standard set of JavaScript classes and libraries of code that you can take advantage of in your extensions or adapt for use in your web pages. The benefits of using these prewritten code snippets are many ”they've been pretested by Macromedia, and are used in much of Dreamweaver's own code base. Chances are good that a problem you are struggling with has already been solved in one of these libraries, and even if it hasn't, it's likely that you can use this code as a starting point for solving your specific issue. Either way, Dreamweaver's JavaScript libraries are sure to save you development time and effort compared to creating everything from scratch.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at the standard classes and libraries that ship with Dreamweaver and how you can use them in your own extensions. We'll also discuss object-oriented programming techniques in JavaScript and show you how to create your own classes. Finally, we'll create a working example of a high-level JavaScript class that implements an Include/Exclude list of items, like the ones you see on Yahoo!'s preferences screens and many other places on the web.