One of our major concerns is to make good tools, good extensions. But what does this means.

A good Dreamweaver extension

What makes a Dreamweaver extension and in a general way any application to be considered good. There are more "parameters" that can be accounted to determine that a certain application is a good one. Some of this parameters can be quantified, most of them can't.

Performance

The performance is one of the easiest  parameter that can be determined. It is a quantifiable one and there are tools and ways to determine an application performance. For a Dreamweaver extension there are not tools to determine the performance but some programming techniques can be implemented.

A Dreamweaver extension is inherently slow due to the fact that they are written in JavaScript. Because of this the developer must take good care of the code he's writing as small mistakes can have a huge impact on the extension performance.

There are three performance steps to be addressed when creating a Dreamweaver extension:

1. Loading time
2. Handling speed
3. Code generation speed

All this may not be seen as important factors as Dreamweaver extensions are relatively small in size but let's consider the following one:



This is the ImpAKT's Insert Record Wizard. This is a big one. There are a lot of fields to be initialized at startup. There is also a grid control that must be filled with values generated based on the values of another fields. All this must be done at startup. And doing this fast in JavaScript is not an easy task.

After the initialize part comes the handling. An interface responsiveness is a big issue. Users do not like interfaces that behave like from another era (of computing). So all the events between UI's components must be handled with care, not to clutter the system with communication.

The user has set up the parameters, click's OK and the code is generated. This wizard (set up like in the image) generates 140 lines of code in 312ms. And trust me this is a good time. Remember: all the extensions are written in JavaScript and the Dreamweaver extensibility layer is also written in JavaScript.

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From time to time we are asked to go and vote with somebody. New people have to come to power and we have to vote which one will be our president and which party will make the government.

I do not intend to go into a political debate here as this blog is not dedicated for something like this I only wish to point a strange coincidence. InterAKT has just celebrated it's forth birthday. And so did our current government :D.

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Has been a long period since I did not post here. I did not forgot but probably I've become too lazy.

We got back from MAX and start to work on the new version of MX Kollection, the MK3.

There are three issues that we will address in this new build.

1. Improved generated code.

One of the things many Dreamweaver users are complaining is the "spaghetti code" generated. In MK3 we will try to improve that in our generated code. A lot of things will be moved behind the scene in included classes and the page code will be much cleaner and will be more easy to understand it.

2. Improved generated page usability.

The generated code will not only look better but also it's functionality and usability will increase. For example MK3 will offer a much better error handling and error reporting for the generated forms, including client side validation.

3. Improved usability for our Dreamweaver extensions' UI.

One of the things we learn at MAX was that our interfaces are not so easy to use. We are mostly technical guys and that is why we were not very successful in writing good interfaces for our extensions. That will change! We are now in the process of refining our interfaces based on the new experience that we have and they will definitely be much better.

I hope to keep you in touch with the working progress of the MX Kollection 3 and I also hope that somebody is reading this :)

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