Background - Adobe 38040334 - Dreamweaver CS3 User Manual

Chapter 1: Introduction
This guide describes the Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS3 framework and application programming
interface (API) that lets you build extensions to Dreamweaver. It provides information about
how each type of extension works; the API functions that Dreamweaver calls to implement the
various objects, menus, floating panels, server behaviors, and so on, that make up the features of
Dreamweaver; and a simple example of each type of extension. This guide also explains how to
customize Dreamweaver by editing tags in various HTML and XML files to add menu items or
document types.
To add an object, menu, floating panel, or other feature to Dreamweaver, you must code the
functions that the particular type of extension requires. This guide describes the arguments that
Dreamweaver passes to these functions and also the values that Dreamweaver expects these
functions to return.
For information on the utility and general-purpose JavaScript™ APIs that you can use to perform
various support operations in your Dreamweaver extensions, see the Dreamweaver API
Reference. If you plan to create extensions that work with databases, you might also want to
review the topics in Using Dreamweaver about making connections to databases.

Background

Most Dreamweaver extensions are written in HTML and JavaScript. This guide assumes that you
are familiar with Dreamweaver, HTML, XML, and JavaScript programming. If you are imple-
menting C extensions, the guide assumes that you know how to create and use C dynamic link
libraries (DLLs). If you are writing extensions for building web applications, you should also be
familiar with server-side scripting on at least one platform, such as Active Server Pages (ASP),
ASP.net, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Macromedia® ColdFusion® from Adobe®, or
JavaServer Pages (JSP).