Chapter 1 Introduction - MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER MX 2004-EXTENDING DREAMWEAVER Manual

This book describes the Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 framework and application
programming interface (API) that lets you build extensions to Dreamweaver. Extensions typically
perform the following types of tasks:
•
Automating changes to the user's current document, such as inserting HTML, CFML, or
JavaScript; changing text or image properties; or sorting tables
•
Interacting with the application to automatically open or close windows, open or close
documents, change keyboard shortcuts, and more
•
Connecting to data sources, which lets Dreamweaver users create dynamic, data-driven pages
•
Inserting and managing blocks of server code in the current document
You might want to write an extension to handle a commonly used, and therefore repetitive, task.
Such an extension could be useful to many web developers. On the other hand, you might have a
unique requirement that you can satisfy only by writing an extension for that specific situation. In
both cases, Dreamweaver provides an extensive set of tools that you can use to add to or customize
its functionality.
This book describes the API functions that Dreamweaver calls to implement the various objects,
menus, floating panels, server behaviors, and so on, that comprise the features of Dreamweaver.
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 book describes the arguments that
Dreamweaver passes to these functions and also the values that Dreamweaver expects these
functions to return.
This book also explains how to customize Dreamweaver by editing and adding tags to various
HTML and XML files to add menu items or document types, and so on.
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
sections in Getting Started with Dreamweaver about making connections to databases.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
13