Is ADDT in active development?

Question

I have recently downloaded the Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox trial and have completed the tutorials available for it on the Dreamweaver Developer Center. In 2003-2004 I was using InterAKT's products off and on, but I'd left web design altogether during the MX Kollection period. Now that I've returned to web design, I find that Adobe has acquired InterAKT and the ADDT product is what remains. Initially, I assumed this was a good sign for tighter integration. I thought that I'd simply get the ADDT trial, spend some time with the documentation, go over the tutorials, read through these forums and get somewhat up to speed and then make my purchase.
However, what I've found is that many of the tools that had been available to InterAKT users are not part of ADDT (and are now discontinued altogether), the documentation is very slim, there is little ADDT specific training material to speak of, and the robust forum interaction that InterAKT provided isn't occurring here.
It's not my intention to flame, rather simply to express my disappointment and my hope that Adobe works to remedy these shortcomings.
- Documentation (The existing documentation isn't bad, it just strikes me a inadequate.)
- Tutorials (Again, the four ADDT specific tutorials were good. I was able to follow them and my resulting applications worked as intended without any hair pulling. But I still do not know how to use most of the ADDT beyond guessing. What about tutorials explaining the Many-to-Many feature, the various User Authentication features, so on & so on?)
- Forum interactivity (I suspect that the forum user-to-user activity would largely pick up on its own if the previous two items were met, but more developer-to-user interaction is really needed with this sort of product. That's a huge part of what made InterAKT so great.)
Beyond that, I have to wonder why features like recordset pagination are not included. That was something that was trivial to add with the InterAKT tools back when I was using in 2003-2004 but it appears there is no such feature in ADDT (unless I'm mistaken). The lack of KTML is unfortunate, but I have read the threads here explaining that at least there are alternatives.
I hope That Adobe places a higher commitment on ADDT in the future. I wonder what the future is for this suite of tools. It's a shame to see the InterAKT extensions in such disarray.
JTueller

Answer 1

Hi,
you´re certainly right, the current documentation is indeed behind what´s been provided when Interakt was still independant -- however, some users (me included) are in the process of contributing new stuff.
Adobe itself will expectedly not be enhancing neither the currently available tutorials nor the ADDT helpfile, so that´s up to us
Forum interactivity (I suspect that the forum user-to-user activity would largely pick up on its own if the previous two items were met, but more developer-to-user interaction is really needed with this sort of product.
the ADDT forum´s interactivity for PHP users has notably improved, wheras the ColdFusion and ASP folks are unfortunately not getting served that well -- mainly due to the lack of experienced Community Experts.
However, as *all* Adobe forums are user-to-user ones, any participance of the developers is not expectable -- that´s once again up to us folks to help each other, but I don´t see a huge problem at least in the PHP realm.
Beyond that, I have to wonder why features like recordset pagination are not included. That was something that was trivial to add with the InterAKT tools back when I was using in 2003-2004 but it appears there is no such feature in ADDT (unless I'm mistaken)
the recordset pagination you´re assumingly talking about has been provided by a separate Interakt extension which has been discontinued -- however that feature as such is still available when using DW´s native recordset pagination with recordsets created by ADDT
I hope That Adobe places a higher commitment on ADDT in the future
A far as I can see, Adobe itself keeps focussing on the main sellers (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash) and of course the RIA
(Rich Internet/Interface Applications) realm. The support for all other products
(including, but not only, ADDT) is sort of community-driven.
I wonder what the future is for this suite of tools
that´s IMHO never really predictable with *any* of Adobe´s products which, like ADDT, rather cover a niche market
It's a shame to see the InterAKT extensions in such disarray
not quite, as some folks are working on improving stuff behind the scenes -- stay tuned :-)
You personally seem to have sorta missed the MX Kollection area -- if you had been there at that time, you would have noticed that ADDT is actually the same as the last Kollection version 3.7, and that all Kollection tutorials still apply to ADDT. However, let´s see if some of the old Kollection tutorials can be retrieved, what would certainly be a good start
Cheers,
Günter Schenk
Adobe Community Expert, Dreamweaver