ANN: Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox (ADDT) to be discontinued

[David_Powers]

It has been officially announced that development of the Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox (ADDT) was discontinued yesterday (9 April), and will remain on sale for the next two weeks, after which it will be withdrawn. Details of the announcement can be found here: http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/addt/. There is also a FAQ regarding the decision here: http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/addt/eol_faq.html.

For the avoidance of any doubt, this does NOT affect Dreamweaver itself. Dreamweaver is alive and well.

ADDT is a Dreamweaver extension that contains additional server behaviors, and was originally marketed as InterAKT's MX Kollection.

[NancyG]

Good grief!  From the language of the announcement, ASP is going to be dead in DW also.

What I don't understand is why it's still for sale.  Doesn't make any sense to sell it in one paragraph and announce its demise in the next on the same page.

[David_Powers]

The announcement says nothing about ASP. As you have pointed out yourself in the past, ADDT is mainly focused on PHP. However, it says nothing about PHP, either. It's simply saying this is the end of the line for one particular product.

I think Adobe has done the right thing in giving people two weeks left to test and buy it. But it has also given a warning that if you buy it now, you're doing so in the full knowledge of its future. Some people find ADDT very useful, but it has always been a tiny minority of Dreamweaver users. I'm sure it will be difficult for those who have come to rely on it, but my hope is that the resources devoted to ADDT can now be redeployed to making the core Dreamweaver product stronger for mainstream users whichever web technology they decide to use.

[NancyG]

Nope .. it says nothing about ASP directly.  I'm reading between the lines from this statement in the FAQ:

Visit the Adobe Developer Connection for resources on building  web applications and dynamic websites with Dreamweaver, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, and ColdFusion.

Do you see ASP listed?  I don't.

[David_Powers]

Yes, I do see ASP listed, but admittedly it's only one article (Setting up an ASP development environment).

As you're aware, Nancy, details of what will be in future versions of Dreamweaver are rarely, if ever, announced in advance. Adobe took the unusual step in August 2007 of announcing what would be dropped from Dreamweaver CS4. I have no idea whether a similar announcement will be made this time.

However, the FAQ concerning the decision to discontinue ADDT makes this point:

Therefore, in order to help our web professional customers take advantage of the functionalities brought by the rising use of CMS frameworks and the strong web design capabilities of Dreamweaver, we have decided to focus our efforts on delivering features in Dreamweaver that will help developers easily and quickly integrate, brand, and customize prebuilt components, instead of going through a separate tool.

I realize that classic ASP is still popular, but if I were making a business decision as to where to put my resources, it would be pretty low on my list of priorities. I started with ASP about 10 years ago, but realized pretty quickly that Microsoft was planning to dump it in favour of .NET. Since .NET wasn't mature enough at the time, I made the switch to PHP. With hindsight, it was the right choice.