Good news, everyone! MyQuery Builder is now available as an app in the Chrome Web Store. Once you install it, an icon will appear on your new tab and/or home screens. Click on that icon, and it takes you directly to the Query Builder (assuming you’ve signed up, etc.).

MyQuery Builder, if you don’t know, is a visual MySQL query editor and php code building tool designed for php web developers. Try it for free or find out more information at myquerybuilder.com.

I’m proud to announce the launch of my latest project, MyQueryBuilder.com!

MyQuery Builder is a visual tool for professional PHP developers who need to construct MySQL queries reliably and easily. If you have ever needed to build database functionality into your site, you’ll want to check MyQuery Builder out. The tool is a web-based app that can run either in the cloud or locally on your dev server. It is designed work in harmony with your existing tools (e.g. Dreamweaver, Coda, BBEdit, etc.) and to be an integral tool in your production pipeline.

At the heart of MQB is the SELECT Query Builder that lets you drag and drop tables and fields on one another to build your query up interactively. It’s a really slick way to build even complex queries with multiple JOINs and condition statements. Find out more and see the SELECT Query Builder in action.

Its counterpart is the Utility Query Builder that lets you build UPDATE, INSERT, REPLACE, TRUNCATE, and DELETE queries with just a few clicks.

Both tools can throw their resulting queries over to the PHP Code Builder that construct functions and class methods (or stand-alone procedural code) with ease. If you’re working on multiple projects simultaneously, you can use saved Sets that create code to your custom coding standards. It even supports both the old MySQL and the newer MySQLi PHP extensions.

The starter account is free, so there’s no risk at all to kicking the tires. For more advanced developers or situations where you need to access secure data, there’s an option for you to download and install MQB on your local development server. Compare the features and pricing over at MyQueryBuilder.com.

MyQuery Builder is an integral part of my development workflow, and I hope it will be for you, too.

To help spread the word about MyQuery Builder, you’ll get a free month of the Pro or Locally Hosted plans for every user you sign up. Simply put your referral link up on your blog or site and you can conceivably never pay for the service.

After ten long years, I’m finally kicking Dreamweaver to the curb. I’m done. I’ve had it. I’m divorcing Dreamweaver.

In this article, I’ll chronicle my journey and describe the choices I made along the way. I committed to switching away and used the productization of my MySQL query building tool, MyQuery Builder, as the testbed for this experiment. After a few jarring days, I grew to love Coda and I haven’t looked back since.

If you have ever thought about looking for an alternative to Dreamweaver but have never made the leap due to difficulties in learning new tools or finding equivalent functionality, you’ll be interested in my story.

My Breaking Point

I have been seriously thinking about eliminating Dreamweaver from my development workflow since the release of CS3. Since Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia, the app has steadily gotten worse. This is not a knock on the very capable members of the Dreamweaver development team, more the inevitable result a publicly traded company’s demand to upgrade a product that tries to serve too many disperate audiences. Designers are not developers, and the tools they need are vastly different. In an effort to serve both audiences, Dreamweaver has ultimately failed both. The app is crumbling under its own weight.

With each CS release, the app became less usable, more buggy, and increasingly bloated with shore-horned features that try to serve too many masters yet ultimately serve none. With CS5.5, Dreamweaver things reached a critical breaking point. Between the crashes, the bugs, the data corruption, and the addition of yet another bucketload of features I didn’t need or want, I’d had it. I was done.

This is the app I cut my developer teeth on; the app that used to be indispensable; the app I recommended to colleagues; the app I deployed to my teammates; the app that I could count on for professional-quality web development.

Alas, Dreamweaver ultimately became the app I loathed with every keystroke and cursed with every click.

It’s sad, really. As with the end of a real marriage, I mourned the history I have with Dreamweaver. I’ve developed hundreds of web sites using Dreamweaver. I’ve developed entire production pipelines and internal tools based specifically to work with Dreamweaver. But in the end, the relationship was rotten to its core, and I needed to move on.

Removing Dreamweaver from my production pipeline has mostly been an exercise in finding—and in some cases, building—equivalent tools. But more than anything, it has been an exercise in unlearning practically every development pattern I know and overcoming ancient habits.

In the end, I write this saying it’s done. It’s over. I did it. And you can do it too. You can step off the ledge. You won’t fall.

First, the End

The biggest challenge has been finding equivalent tools. Here’s what I ultimately landed on:

• For the day-to-day, bread-and-butter coding, Coda is the best tool around. The biggest hurdle to using it was getting past its differences between Dreamweaver. Trying to work in Coda after a decade of doing it the "Dreamweaver Way" is, in a word, shocking. There are some tricks I’ll describe later to ease this shock, but you still have to fight through it. However, I’m here to say that not only can you make the transition, you should. It’s a much better live out here on the other side.
• One gaping hole in Coda’s feature set is support for dynamic site development ("Server Behaviors" in DW parlance). For this, I significantly upgraded and productized some internal tools I’ve developed over the years. The end result is MyQuery Builder which lets you build MySQL queries and wrap them in PHP code. In fact, it was the project to productize MyQuery Builder that I chose to ween myself off of Dreamweaver.
• For version control (which I never really used Dreamweaver for anyway), Versions.app is the tool of choice.
• For direct file transfer, Transmit can’t be beat even by Coda’s built in FTP capabilities.
• I still use the Mac’s Terminal app for command line work, TextExpander for snippets, and Dropbox for seamless development across development machines.

So between these tools, I have 98% of my development work covered. The one thing I still miss is the ability to scaffold forms quickly. I’m sure I’ll figure this out, though. It has to be a solved problem. I simply have to find—or write—the right tool. In the mean time, I can code by hand.

Now, the Journey

Now that you know the end, what follows is the journey that got me here.

It took a little over a week to work through the loss of productivity learning the new tools. Here goes…

Standing at the Ledge

For years, I’ve been building up to dumping Dreamweaver. My production pipeline is a patchwork quilt of tools that all have the same characteristic: each overcomes some shortcoming in Dreamweaver. Site-wide search and replace is done in TextWrangler; complex MySQL query construction was accomplished in MyQuery Builder; code cleanup and formatting in various internal tools; JavaScript development in BBEdit. File transfer with Transmit and version control with Versions. But at the core of all of this was Dreamweaver.

Over the years, I’ve tried replacing Dreamweaver. I experimented with alternative tools like Espresso, hardcore tools like TextMate, and even <shudder>Java-based PHP IDEs.</shudder> I was desperate.

However, change is hard. My life is a series of deadlines, so I never found the time to work through that initial shock of learning a new tool. After every attempt, I would hit some brick wall of productivity and just figured it wasn’t worth the time and effort, so I kept coming back to Dreamweaver for my day to day PHP coding.

With CS5.5, the cost/benefit scales titled. Not only was Dreamweaver quirky, slow, and inefficient, it was now crashing like mad and corrupting my data. I was done.

Facing failure again, I knew that a successful jump depended on a wholesale commitment to finding and adopting the right tool for me. I knew this would be hard to do with a client site, so I chose an internal project that had no strict deadlines and upon which I could experiment.

The Perfect Guinea Pig

MyQuery Builder is a visual query builder that lets you build complex MySQL queries by dragging and dropping fields on one another. It started life strictly as an internal tool, but I knew it would be of benefit to other developers, so I decided to productize it and make it work in a wider variety of environments. Thus, MyQueryBuilder.com was born.

Being built in Dreamweaver originally, the proto-MQB was a hodgepodge of frameworks and standards all necessitated by the desire to make the tool compatible with Dreamweaver’s widgets and tools. A massive benefit to eliminating this dependency on Dreamweaver editability: much cleaner code. Dreamweaver’s tentacles reached way down into functions, classes, site structure and file organization. It was nuts.

So I had a project that had no deadlines that was also a perfect testbed for experimentation. It was perfect, so I jumped.

The rest of this article is a diary of sorts chronociling the difficulties I encountered and the techniques I used to overcome them.

Epilogue

So it’s been about a month since I removed Dreamweaver from my Dock. That was a huge psychological moment for me. Since then, I’ve opened Dreawever twice; once to build an unbelievably complex form, and the other time to open a legacy site that wasn’t set up in Coda yet for a quickie, one-sentence edit.

My conclusions:

• Coda is the bomb. Coda2, I hope, will overcome a few of the rough spots that remain in the feature set, but they don’t need to change much.
• Not only is it nicer working in Coda than in Dreamweaver, I never realized how deeply the "Dreamweaver Way" impacted my site architecture choices and coding style. It’s like getting rid of a limp you never realized you had.
• Replacing Coda’s default syntax highlighting themes with ones that more closely matched Dreamweaver’s overcame one of the biggest, yet most subtle, psychological barriers in this process
• If anything, this effort has made me realize just how bad Dreamweaver is. I never knew…

So there you have it. It’s done. Dreamweaver is out of my life, and I’m better for it.