As a valued WebAssist community member, we wanted to let you know of an important change to our upcoming product line. To better serve your needs and expand the depth of our offerings, WebAssist will be focusing efforts on the PHP platform exclusively and will cease to support classic ASP and ColdFusion.
WebAssist started with classic ASP more than 10 years ago which for many years was the dominant server-side solution. Now, PHP has grown to be a much more complete and sensible option and classic ASP is no longer actively being developed. Read here about all of the reasons:
http://webassist.c.topica.com/maamk5QabK3PYb9QbqFb/
http://webassist.c.topica.com/maamk5QabK3PZb9QbqFb/
http://webassist.c.topica.com/maamk5QabK3PXb9QbqFb/
We believe that PHP and MySQL is the right choice for dynamic web development in Dreamweaver, and making this choice clear will allow us to make your development tasks easier to accomplish. We feel that by providing a clear and direct path in the right direction, we will be able to better assist you and create better products.
We encourage current classic ASP and ColdFusion users to continue using the existing products to maintain sites already built, and we will continue to help you with any problems you incur while we make this transition. Minor updates (also known as dot releases) of products that support multiple server models will continue to be tested on all platforms. However, new products and major new versions (like those moving from version 2.x to 3.0) with new enhanced features will only be available in PHP.
We strongly urge you to move to PHP now for any new projects or sites you are currently developing. PHP is free! PHP works wonderfully with MySQL databases, which are also free! You will be able to transfer your existing database to MySQL easily, and hosting with PHP is generally cheaper! WebAssist is still committed to your success in this transition, so we are ready to help you through our support channel and provide documentation to help you get started with PHP. We have Solution Recipes for Windows (Vista and XP) users and a How-To post describing steps for Mac users that show you how to set up PHP and MySQL step-by-step.
By focusing our directed efforts, WebAssist will be able to provide clearer steps to success for customers having difficulties tackling the challenges of dynamic web site development. We will be able to provide more specific answers and ask fewer questions when you get started.
In the past a user who had only used static web pages would purchase a WebAssist extension and would immediately be faced with very difficult questions:
What server language should I use? What database should I use? Who should I host with? What level of plan do I need?
The combinations were mindboggling, and a clear answer would always seem subjective.
For our Documentation team, it was difficult to provide clear or specific direction even in the very first steps on how to get started because of the vast number of options. For our QA team, testing all of those options also became very difficult and time consuming sometimes using dozens of iterations to cover all of the server models and the myriad of database platforms we supported. Our engineering team would have to cut a particular feature if it didn’t work on all four server models, sometimes leaving important functionality out. Our marketing team, who work post-production creating tutorials and sample web sites, had to be repeat their efforts and offer branched instructions and therefore couldn’t go into as much depth as desired.
The decision to focus on PHP exclusively was a difficult one, but in the long run we believe it will improve our documentation, allow for more functionality, increase stability, allow better samples, and ultimately be better for our entire user base. I think even our classic ASP and ColdFusion users will thank us in the long run for helping them make this transition and will improve their speed and rate of success using our products.
We thank you for your ongoing feedback in how we can further assist you in this transition. We are excited about the opportunities this will open up for both you and us and look forward to helping you continue to build better websites, faster.
Ray Borduin
VP Engineering
WebAssist.com
