Dreamweaver alternatives

Cheap and stingy, or just frugal. Sometimes you don’t have the cash to shell out 300-some dollars for the student version of Adobe Creative Suite, and you certainly don’t want to be in the labs all your waking hours. What do you do in lieu of finding a copy of Dreamweaver that has the chance of making you do the leagal dance down the road? Find an alternative you can live with, of course. Here’s a quick list to get you thinking.

1) Notepad

The man’s way of programming HTML and anything else. Notepad is simple, no-frills text editing at its best. Name your file whater.asp, open it up in notepad, and you’re ready to roll.

Disadvantages: No site controll; no syntax highlighting; no file tabs.

2) Notepad ++

Someone knew that notepad was sweet, but it needed some futuristic components. With the addition of a WYSIWYG editor, syntax highlighting for all your favorite languages, and tabbed files, the ++ is certainly deserved. Also, totally free.

Disadvantages: Still no site function, not a FTP function.

3) Aptana

A new player, Aptana is focused towards boosting the productivity of the current state of web development. Tabbed files, syntax highlighting, site forms, and FTP function are all here.

Disadvantages: Programmed from an open-source perspective, Microsoft languages not supported. Heavily focused on AJAX and javascript, may not be for beginning users.

4) Eclipse

Eclipse is much like notepad++, but with no support for microsoft languages. An extendible IDE that can be used for pretty much anything, and free.

Disadvantages: Eclipse is meant mainly for programming, and less for web development. Use with extreme caution.

Others

If you google for Dreamweaver alternatives, you find a good deal. A word of caution before choosing the perfect one: Dreamweaver is sometimes synonymous with phrase “HTML Layout program”, and many of the alternatives listed will not provide a good interface for the dynamic backend coding needed in this class.