Learn about previewing Dynamic Webpages in this Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Advanced training video series.


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Video Transcription

Before we punch into the Advanced features in Dreamweaver and ColdFusion, I want to begin by briefly exploring the differences between static websites and dynamic sites. My goal in this chapter is just to help you appreciate how database driven sites work and some of the advantages that make it worth the steeper learning curve and longer setup site. What you see on the screen here is a dynamic website opened in Dreamweaver. That's why you don't actually see the images or the text that will display on this page. You only see the ColdFusion tags, until you actually preview the page in the browser or use the Live Data View feature in Dreamweaver. You will find that right here when you click on this button. You will see that the content of the page is displayed much like it would look in a browser. If you actually want to be able to preview dynamic pages on your local computer. You will have to have a Development Server installed on your machine. When you go to Preview you will see that Dreamweaver prompts you to update the files on the Testing server. With the files updated you can preview the page just like you would see it if it was being surfed by a Web Server connected to the Internet. One of the advantages of ColdFusion is that it comes with the Development Server that you can install as you install ColdFusion. If you prefer you can use the IIS Development Server for Windows or you can use Apache on the Macintosh. When I Preview this page, it's the ColdFusion Development Server that's actually pulling content from my database dynamically and it's all happening right here on my local computer which is great because that means I can get all of the bugs worked out before I publish this site to a live server. Because the content like this image and the text here is dynamically pulled from a database, I can create advanced features like randomly displaying different Models and Agents on the front page. So watch what happens when I preview this page, pressing the F5 key here in Internet Explorer and you see each time that I hit the F5 key, I get a different random display of a Model and an Agent. You have probably noticed by now that all of the models in this site are leaping into the air and yes all of my agents are animals. But they all have experienced jumping and yes this is a sample site I created just for this series. You won't actually find it anywhere live on the Internet, but I hope you find it amusing as we go through this series.