O’Reilly: Inside RIA

A couple of months ago, I got a brand new Dell laptop. To future-proof it, I ordered it with enough RAM that it needed 64-bit Windows to fully use all that muscle. So, once my in-house IT department (AKA my wonderful husband) installed Windows 7 on it, I fired it up for the first time and went through the process of setting it up to connect to the servers at work. Oops! I immediately had a problem. The Citrix client that the company I work for provides for download and installation won't even install to 64-bit Windows, and according to Server Guy (yes, that's his official title), the 64-bit clients it does make require an upgrade to the servers.

There was a discussion going on internally at O'Reilly spawned by an email from Tim O'Reilly pointing editors at a post commented on at Slashdot about a blog post made by a web designer: Dreamweaver is Dying, Long Live Drupal. (Original post is here).

One of the hardest challenges in the web design field is designing and creating a site that will be managed and updated by someone else. That someone else will eventually put on the hat of the webmaster - independently adding, updating and removing content often with little or limited web experience.

In case you haven't been following there's been some buzz about Dreamweaver recently and the next version is drastically improved for today's web developer. Whether you're focused on design or interactive user interfaces with JavaScript you should definitely take a look and download the beta. They're going away from WYISYG everything and just trying to make coding easier. In this screencast I caught up with Scott Fegette from the Dreamweaver product management team to get a demo of the new features.

RIA developers, of the Ajax variety in particular, should be excited to see what's coming down the pipe from Adobe's Creative Suite Teams. Dreamweaver has been waiting for a massive overhaul for some time now. It looks like it will really start to fill the void in Ajax tool space. The Live View I think might be the start of that, out of the box code hinting for a few popular Ajax libraries doesn't hurt either. It looks like they're trying to give us some nice prototyping features in Fireworks which sounds kind of interesting too.

I just got back from the AjaxWorld conference in New York last week. Here's my wrap up notes and thoughts on the event. On the whole it seemed very well attended and had some interesting and very packed sessions.