Although the most robust WYSIWYG tool for web site development today is Dreamweaver 3, if you begin to go beyond WYSIWYG and manually code your websites with server-side script such as ASP, PHP, JSP or CFML, Dreamweaver makes a mess of them. For coding by hand, you need a tool which gives you flexibility at the code level. That tool is Allaire’s HomeSite 4.5.
The thing that astounded me most about HomeSite is that I didn’t need a book to learn it. I opened HomeSite for the first time and found one feature after another which made my ASP programming easier for me. It was like finding a box of tools which I had needed for a long time and immediately appreciated and knew how to use them.
For example, the default color coding suddenly made my code easy to read. And as I switched from .asp files to .htm files, I noticed that HomeSite intelligently switches color coding patterns based on the file extension. You can even set your own color coding for files with specific extensions. Very nice.
I excitedly began running through HomeSite’s menus looking for cool features and quickly found code templates (accessed with F8). These are easy-to-use macros for code you often repeat. For instance, I made a code template for my often used and messy “if – else – end if" block so that now when I type “if” and CTRL-J, the full code block pops up with the cursor ready to go right under the IF-statement -- something I always found awkward in other code editors.
The ASP buttons at the top-right were a pleasant surprise and I still use them frequently. In the 4.5 version, you will also find buttons for JSP and CFML, along with standard buttons for all the HTML commands of course. Use these a couple times and you will find that they actually save time. Another related time saver is to right-click on a tag to change its parameters.
Web developers know that server-script code interspersed into HTML can be some of the messiest stuff you ever work with. If you work with these long, unwieldy script files, something you will find totally cool in version 4.5 is “code collapsing”. It works like this: select a block of text and click the minus button to collapse it into a grey button. Do this a couple times and you can get an overview of even the longest, messiest script file you have. Double click on the button and that code block expands again. It reminds me of the organizational efficiency of Microsoft Word’s outline view – an incredible feature whose time has come for code scripting!
HomeSite was obviously made by programmers for programmers. (I even heard that HomeSite is the application of choice for programmers at Microsoft). In any case, HomeSite is intuative and easy to use. For instance, the full web site search and replace is smooth: type in the word, get a list of file names which contain that word, click on a file name and you see the highlighted word in that file which you searched for. Simple, but not all editors make it that easy. Another instance of Homesite’s intuativeness is the ease with which you can organize your web sites into projects, then act on all the files as a project no matter where the files are actually located on your system. This can save minutes and hours for developers of large web applications.
Two other nice features I found: First, the HTML reference manual contained in HomeSite is thorough and chock full of examples. When I need to know a detail for an HTML tag, I check the HomeSite manual. And second, you will notice that Homesite and Dreamweaver both have little buttons which connect them to each other, even though these applications are made by two different companies (Macromedia and Allaire). The connection between the two is complementary and works well technically, as each application knows if the file has been changed by the other and asks you if you want to accept the changes as you come back in. This smooth cooperation between Dreamweaver and Homesite is like a secret handshake between two front runners who know they’re the best. It's a classy combination.
This concludes my three part series of the web developer’s triology. Summary: If you do graphics, get Fireworks 3. If you do WYSIWYG design, use Dreamweaver 3. And if you code manually, or you want to, give Homesite 4.5 a test drive and see if you are not pleasantly surprised at the efficiency boost which HomeSite adds to your coding skills. If you have a lot of coding experience, you will probably pick up HomeSite quickly without a book. But if you would like a good book on HomeSite, get HomeSite 4.5 for Dummies (co-written by Nick Bradbury, one of the creators of Homesite) which will quickly give you a thorough knowledge of HomeSite 4.5 basics.
