Dreamweaver templates were the original static site generator. I used them to build a bunch of small sites in the early 2000’s. They worked so well that the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum used them to run its site until 2018:
As recently as a couple years ago I had colleagues still using Dreamweaver to code up email templates (email is the Land Before Time of HTML rendering where tables still rule for layout).
Dreamweaver started at Macromedia too, as did Flash and Cold Fusion. It’s amazing the impact Macromedia had. The founders later went on to start Brightcove, one of the first big white label cloud video providers.
Indeed, I still have one backend in production built back then with Drumbeat. Its UI was very new and rebuilt/consulted with Alan Cooper of Thunder/Visual Basic/About Face fame.
I love how xcode's object -> function mapping seems inspired by visual basic / delphi, but actually makes no fucking sense when compared to those tools.
My start was Microsoft FrontPage 2000, which I used for years even after I stopped using the GUI features for development.
I skipped Dreamweaver entirely and went to straight text editors.
Nowadays on the frontend you can more or less recreate the same effect with Webpack hot reloading. You get instant feedback on changes which makes for a supremely productive development experience.
Mine as well...in 2015, at a university that maintained lot of small-to-medium complexity websites. It did the job well and was easy to work with, even if I sometimes felt like was carving in my 1s and 0s with stone and chisel.
But if I were still working there I would probably replace most of the sites - which were largely abstractions of forms and tables - with something like power apps instead.
I actually got introduced to it in ICT lessons at high school.
Oh Adobe. The memory of their software is so nostalgic. Don't get me started, I'll be talking about macromedia shockwave next...