I've been taking a look at DreamWeaver's extensibility recently with a view to helping me with my "visual" WO development. I've recently moved to Eclipse/WOLips from XCode and am quite happy -- even with "hand-coding" my tags and wod definitions. Although I must say that if I hadn't had an upbringing on WOBuilder then it would have been *much* harder to get into the groove of hand building my HTML front end. I find myself mentally visualising what the page would have looked like in WOBuilder to help me make sure my hierarchies of webobject tags are OK! I wouldn't like to to come to this, new, for the first time!
Anyway, my Eclipse WOA development tree lives inside a DreamWeaver site so that I can use DreamWeaver's templating ability to provide and update my page furniture as well as WYSIWYG for the non-WO bits (including tables woooo!). The trouble is, of course that DW ignores the WO tags and it doesn't help me visualise my page structure any better. I figure that whilst I might not get the drag'n'drop-ability (?) of WOBuilder if I can get DW to at least show my WO tags and their hierarchy then that's a great step forward and might help others who work with page designers rather than programmers.
To cut a long story short (although I feel it's too late if you've got this far) DW is really quite extensible and it relatively straight-forward to add to its tag library (thereby enabling code completion, elementary validation etc within DW) and also to create placeholder graphics to show where WO tags are on the page in a similar way how WOBuilder did it. Further, although it might be beyond my capability if it needs C programming, one could create Tag editors within DW which might offer the library of WO elements to pick from and this would especially suit the inline style of .wo files rather than the .html/.wod duo.
Here's my question then before I get too deep into this and find out it wasn't worthwhile:
Because I'm a recent convert to Eclipse/WOLips I'm a bit new to the inline binding style (which would suit the plan with DW above) and don't use it myself yet, I'd like to understand a few things.
1) Can the inline binding style *completely* do away with the wod file?
2) Is this what Apple meant in their update notice for 5.4 when they said, "Combined Component Template Parser that reduces .wo components to single .html file"
3) Are inline bindings for 5.4 only, can I use them in 5.3 (Eclipse only I think, not Xcode), or are they Wonder only?
4) Anything else I should know that might help me here (or indeed if someone has done this before, although a google for "webobjects dreamweaver tag library" turned up little.)
Neil
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.neilmac