Should I purchase ADDT

Question

Hi Everyone-
I've been developing PHP applications for about 4 years. All using PHP Designer, which is basically notepad with syntax highlighting and error checking. Of course I've also gotten fairly involved with javascript, and over the last year a lot more CSS.
I purchased DW CS3 about a week ago and following along in a book to get a understanding on how to use the app. So far, in my opinion, I am amazed by how much time I will save by using this tool. I cannot wait to be fluent, because I expect to increase product by 5x's what I am doing now. I feel like a caveman that just discovered fire...
I just read some information about ADDT. It seems like it would be an incredible tool, and timesaver as well. But, how is the code that it generates as far a readability, ease of changes. Any bugginess to it? Anyone deal with integrating it into existing PHP apps? It seems like a godsend to me, like it would increase my production times even more.
Anyone else who feels confident in laying down PHP straight into an editor move to ADDT and happy that the did?
Thanks to anyone who's spent the time to read through my novel....

Answer 1

Charlie,
ADDT has been a great time saver for me. It is great for quickly turning around small to medium applications. Check out the Dynamic List Wizard, and the Dynamic Form Wizard. Just those two tools alone make it worth it for me. All the Form Wizards and extra Form Controls are great. The ease of Form Validation is awesome, and it does both client side and server side form validation. You can use it's built in form validation for things such as email and phone numbers, but you can also use regular expressions to validate the data. ADDT helps you easily control what kind of data your form will accept, which is great for security, and it protects against MySQL injection attacks.
With your knowledge of PHP, you should have no problem understanding the code it produces and customizing the code for you application. I think you have a big advantage with this tool if you have a decent knowledge of PHP and MySQL(as in my case, I know there are other languages/databases supported by ADDT).
Please be advised that, just like any other tool, there is a learning curve and there is not any direct Adobe support for this tool. You will have to do quite a bit of reading of the documentation, tutorials, and forums to get your information. Even though there is no direct Adobe support, there is a fairly active community on these forums for support.
ADDT does have some quirks, but all issues I have had using it have been solved by reading the forums. Some of these issues can be a pain, but the longer I've worked with the ADDT tools, the more I've learned to avoid most of them.
As for "integrating it into existing PHP apps", I have not done this myself. It would probably depend on the application.
Shane