Give me direction

[bubarooni]

I am used to using Visual Interdev as my development environment and also use FrontPage. I have been asked to redevelop a site and the customer has specifically requested that I use Macromedia products. I asked why and he said a business associate said he can get a better website using it. He wants this and will not accept anything else.

I have no experience with any of these products though. He says he'll foot the bill and I can buy whatever I need. Can you tell me the benefits of these products and what they will allow me to do and how they relate to one another:

ColdFusion

SiteSpring

DreamWeaver UltraDev 4

DreamWeaver

Fireworks

Flash

Flash I have heard of but never used. You can save me many hours of research just explaining what the different products do. Also, if I am experienced with the Microsoft products (asp, vbscipt and jscript being my primary tools)do you think I'll have a positive move to the MacroMedia products or will I be starting from scratch? How steep is the learning curve? I hate to just walk away from the job.

 

[tleish]

ColdFusion - Application server
Formerly created by Allaire and became a Macromedia product when Macromedia purchased/merged with Allaire. Macrmedia has several products in this, if giving a comparison to your knowledge then ColdFusion server is to ASP as ColdFusion Studio is to Visual Interdev.

SiteSpring Application Management Tool
Never used this before myself. It's supposed to solve three common professional web team challenges—team collaboration, file management and client communications.

DreamWeaver - HTML WYSIWIG
WYSIWIG Html authoring tool, similar to Frontpage.

DreamWeaver UltraDev 4 - HTML WYSIWIG
This is a more beefed up version of Dreamweaver that even more like Frontpage, in that is allows creation of application components... this one is ever more similar to Frontpage.

Fireworks - Graphics Tool
This is a graphics editing tool used primarily to create gif and jpg files for the web.

Flash - Vector animation tool

As far as the learning curve, ColdFusion is known for it's rapid devlepment of applications. Since you allready have a programming background, you should be able to pick up on it quicker than others. It may be a little frustrating at first because it's different but give it a chance and I think you'll like it.

One similarity between ASP and ColdFusion is that you can mix it right in with HTML.

ASP IF/ELSE
<% AA=&quot;water&quot;
If AA=&quot;water&quot; Then %>
I want to [COLOR=000080]<i>[/color]drink[COLOR=000080]</i>[/color] [COLOR=000080]<b>[/color]water[COLOR=000080]</b>[/color]
<% Else %>
I want to [COLOR=000080]<i>[/color]drink[COLOR=000080]</i>[/color] [COLOR=000080]<b>[/color]milk[COLOR=000080]</b>[/color]
<% End If %>

ColdFusion IF/ELSE
<cfset AA = &quot;water&quot;>
<cfif AA EQ &quot;water&quot;>
I want to [COLOR=000080]<i>[/color]drink[COLOR=000080]</i>[/color] [COLOR=000080]<b>[/color]water[COLOR=000080]</b>[/color]
<cfelse>
I want to [COLOR=000080]<i>[/color]drink[COLOR=000080]</i>[/color] [COLOR=000080]<b>[/color]milk[COLOR=000080]</b>[/color]
</cfif>
- tleish

 

[bubarooni]

Thanks. That's exactly what I wanted to know. You saved me lots of research time.

 

[bubarooni]

One last question. I develop on a Win2k machine running PWS. If I were to install any of these MacroMedia programs will I run a risk of 'messing up' my web services configuration on my workstation? Specifically, my FrontPage server extensions.

Thanks Again
Kelly

 

[tleish]

I'm pretty sure it won't. I previously ran ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, Perl, and JSP all on PWS at the same time. I'm not sure about FrontPage, I never used them and so hadn't tested to see if they did.

-tleish - tleish