Macromedia has released on of the most powerful development tools available with Dreamweaver UltraDev. Since Macromedia acquired Drumbeat it has only been a matter of time since it was fully integrated into the Dreamweaver development sphere. Well that is exactly what has happened with Dreamweaver UltraDev, Macromedia have taken Drumbeat 2000, updated it and incorporated it fully into Dreamweaver 3 with some quite remarkable results.

The days when every site relied upon static HTML pages are long gone with more and more developments utilising dynamic Web applications. A Web application is a collection of Web pages that contain server logic which when run by the server dynamically generate content.

Dreamweaver UltraDev is the first development solution to include powerful HTML design features and powerful application building features for ASP (Microsoft's Active Server Pages), JSP (Sun's JavaServer Pages) and CFML (Allaire's Cold Fusion Markup Language), in one visual environment.

In addition to all the features found in Dreamweaver like HTML -based Dream Templates, CSS Styles and JavaScript Behaviours, Dreamweaver UltraDev provides a complete set of features for adding database connections, displaying server side content, adding server side scripts and previewing dynamic content.

One of the most difficult components of developing a Web application is creating and testing SQL statements. Advanced database logic is often outside the expertise of many developers, not any more. Dreamweaver UltraDev provides all the features users need to easily connect a Web site to a database with tools to automatically generate SQL statements. Dreamweaver UltraDev users can connect to any database through ADO or JDBC. They can define custom connection strings for their database connection making it easy to deploy sites on remote hosts. Options include simple ODBC DSN's or more complex DSNless and JDBC connections.

Dreamweaver UltraDev offers server-specific database connection objects which allow users to connect to databases using SQL statements or by calling stored procedures. The database objects included, provide both simple and complex options. For users not familiar with SQL, the basic view allows customers to connect to any database table and display the contents. More advanced users can write their own SQL in the SQL editor or work in their favourite SQL development environment and import the SQL into the product. This means that you can choose to work with SQL or have Dreamweaver UltraDev generate it automatically.

So how easy is it to develop a database driven Web site, the answer to this is that for the experienced Dreamweaver user it's extremely easy and any competent developer should be able to have a basic database driven Web site up in a matter of hours rather than days. For those of you not experienced with Dreamweaver 3, then you'll have a steeper learning curve as you'll need to become accustomed to the Dreamweaver interface before you can start. As Macromedia provide excellent tutorials and manuals within all their packages even this learning curve is not as great as you might think, and by following the Macromedia Database tutorial you'll learn exactly how easy it really is.

One of the best features of both Dreamweaver and now Dreamweaver UltraDev is the ability to actually expand its capabilities through the use of the extension manager (Flash 5 is similar also). The extensions manager enables developers to quickly download and install powerful additions to Dreamweaver UltraDev.

To give you an example of this, Dreamweaver UltraDev comes without a shopping cart system, by simply visiting the Macromedia exchange Web site you can download a shopping cart system and have it installed and working in a matter of minutes. There are hundreds of these so-called extensions available and they range from basic frame busters to complex WAP development tools and almost all of them are completely free of charge which is extremely refreshing.

Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev offers the developer a single design environment for developing Web pages and Web applications. UltraDev is as technical and complex as you wish to make it, it allows you to quickly and easily develop Web applications no matter how experienced you are.

I would however point out that, a good understanding of database design is still required, not to use Dreamweaver UltraDev but to get the very best out of the product... just like learning HTML helps you design and understand Web sites better.

Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev is now a firm favourite of mine, in fact I cannot recommend this product enough it really is that good. If I could only have one piece of development software it would be Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev. It is not only an excellent piece of kit but also the speed at which Dreamweaver UltraDev allows you to develop projects is quite remarkable and for that fact alone it will save numerous hours of conventional development work.