Chapter 3. Preparing Your Coding Environment

3. Preparing Your Coding Environment

Building Web applications is back-end work that focuses on coding. Now that you have a Web server and an application server, and you've set up a Dreamweaver site, it's time to set up your Dreamweaver coding environment before you start working directly with code.

As an experienced Dreamweaver user, you already know about Dreamweaver's document view options, which include Code, Design, and Split (Code and Design combined). While all three views can be useful when developing Web applications, you're likely to use Code view most often, because application development usually involves more work with code than with design.

Dreamweaver lets you do all your code work by hand or automate coding tasks with Dreamweaver's code tools. Some of these include Dreamweaver's Preferences; the Coding toolbar; Code Hints, which lets you insert code from a suggested list of options; Code Collapse, which lets you collapse sections of code so that you can more easily focus on the sections you're actively editing; and Code Snippets, which are blocks of code that you can store and reuse. You can also work with tags, the building blocks of any code language, in the Tag Selector, the Quick Tag Editor, the Tag Inspector, and tag libraries. In addition, Dreamweaver includes options for cleaning up and troubleshooting your code, as well as for validating your pages.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to access and use the many options you have for working with code in Dreamweaver, and how to configure your coding environment to support your own style of working with code.