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["Josep L. Guallar-Esteve" <jlguallar AT maduixa.net>]

drew wrote:

> Hey all,

Hey Drew,
 
> I'm still a student, and I'm looking at learning Dreamweaver UltraDev for
> building web applications (partly because I'm too damn lazy to learn PHP or
> Java) like shopping carts, customer accounts, database stuff, etc.


Well, being lazy doesn't help when you want to develop apps. Ever heard
of 80 hour weeks? Yeah, that's IT life.
 
> I haven't had much time to look into it yet, but I've been told that there
> might not be much functionality for Mac users (like me) because it uses
> proprietary Microsoft stuff (like ASP).  But I've also heard it will do the
> same with Coldfusion and JSP, and that a Mac design platform is fine if you
> are writing to a server with those things.


One thing is designing, this you can do it on your Mac. Another thing is
testing (running the web app.), for this you need a server machine
(Linux/ *BSD, Solaris, AIX, Win2000 / WinNT, maybe MacOS X) .

Mac is fine for development (even that I will miss several buttons in a
mouse). It's fine if the develping environment exists for MacOS.

If you do not like proprietary stuff, go the open source way: install
Linux for PPC in your Mac. Then, you can develop and try your apps. Yes,
you can run Apache (= web server).

> Can anybody out there tell me for sure what the deal is?  Is ultra dev
> really limited on a Mac platform (I hope not says the PC hater)?  Or can it
> do everything just using different server side tech?

I do not know UltraDev enough. But a web application, by deffinition,
must run cross-platform. So, develop it using what you want. Then, try
it on a web server. Depending on the used tool, you'll be using one or
another web server (Apache, IIS, NeoPlanet...). Check NetCraft.com for
statistics of webservers used on internet.

I know that ColdFusion works pretty well, it's Linux friendly... but is
somewhat costly.

Being you a student, why not going the Open way? It's cheap and
powerfull. As Robert points out, Joe Komeda is giving classes on PHP
development and this thursday there's a presentation on web development
using PHP + MySQL at TriLug http://www.trilug.org . Maybe you want to
show up.


Regards,
Josep Lluis
 
> D-

-- 
Josep L. Guallar-Esteve