Recipes Structure

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Recipes is divided into two, intentionally unbalanced sections. Up front, you'll find a primer of sorts that is intended to serve as a general introduction to both the world of data-driven Web technology and Dreamweaver's implementations. Read these chapters if you are new to working with data sources on the Web, and especially if you are new to Dreamweaver. The bulk of the book is devoted to the Web application recipes.

The recipes themselves are separated into two sections, or cuisines, if you'll indulge us in the metaphor. First you'll find instructions on building such intranet-oriented applications as User Login, Employee Lookup, Conference Room Scheduler, and In/Out Dashboard. Many of these applications have uses that you can apply to general Web applications. User Login, for example, contains authentication routines that you can apply to any portion of the Web where you want to display different content to different groups of users.

The second set of applications is based on workgroup needs. With these applications, you can log billable project hours (Time Cards), facilitate and archive team communication (Journal), and send a personalized email announcement in bulk (Mail Merge). As with the intranet applications, you can extend the workgroup recipes to fit many situations.

Each recipe is structured in a top-down approach. At the beginning of each chapter are diagrams and ingredient listings to provide an overall view of the project so that you can really understand the concept and what's required before going forward into the actual steps. Web applications are composed of a series of intertwining pages, and each application presented is described page-by-page. Each page, in turn, is built up in a series of steps designed to follow the standard developers' workflow and, in the process, teach best practices.

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Recipes offers every recipe in four variations: ASP-VBScript, ASP-JavaScript, ColdFusion, and PHP. The ColdFusion code is designed and tested to be compatible with ColdFusion 5 as well as ColdFusion MX and MX 7. Each language is clearly marked with an icon, so there's no confusion among the variations. For steps that should be taken by all server models, a separate icon is used:

Steps for all recipe users

For ASP-VBScript

For ASP-JavaScript

For ColdFusion

For PHP

The code is professional quality and targeted to today's Web. Reflecting the state of the Web, Cascading Style Sheets are used for the basis of the design and integrated with structured tables for a degree of backward compatibility. As designers do, we needed to make certain choices, such as deciding to support only Internet Explorer 5 and above and Netscape 6 and above.

Note

Code lines that do not fit within the margins of the printed page are continued on the next line and are preceded by a code continuation character: .