Dreamweaver -> Spry -> AIR

Continuing my CS3 trial I was keen to have a look at how Spry is implimented within Dreamweaver. Further to that I was very interested in the process for creating AIR applications using Dreamweaver. My explorations remain at a very basic level. But it still seems worth a short post.

Firstly, lets look at Dreamweaver and Spry. The most commonly used Spry components now have their own tab on the insert bar. Therefore, to add a new data set you select the "new Spry Data Set" button. In the dialog that appears you paste in the data source and select "get Schema". You then select the node of the schema that contains the data you want to work with. If publishing to the browser the usual security limitations apply. If publishing to AIR they don't. Once a data set is defined you can insert elements from the Bindings panel. They need to go into a region and you'll need to use a repeat if the element repeats. These last two options are on the Spry insert tab. What I found nice was that these components could be added to almost any html element and appeared with code hinting if you start typing "spry".

You can preview this in a browser using F12. But if you install the AIR extension (available from Labs) it can be previewed using AIR (Preview > Preview in Adobe AIR). The AIR preview is so simple it's ridiculous. The publish option for AIR seems hidden by comparison. It's within the Site menu (Site > Package as Adobe AIR Application). For some reason publishing my simple test file to AIR was a real buzz.

Anyway, that's all I have time for. If time allows I hope to do some further tests with Spry and AIR in Dreamweaver.