Adobe GoLive
Encyclopedia
Adobe GoLive was a WYSIWYG
HTML editor
and web site management application from Adobe Systems
. It replaced Adobe PageMill
as Adobe's primary HTML editor and was itself discontinued in favour of Dreamweaver. The last version of GoLive that Adobe released was GoLive 9.
Adobe GoLive originated as CyberStudio, the flagship product of a company named GoLive Systems, Inc. then based in Hamburg, Germany. Adobe purchased GoLive in 1999 and re-branded the GoLive CyberStudio product to what became Adobe GoLive. Adobe opened a new Hamburg office to house the development team, which was kept largely intact after the Adobe acquisition and continued to develop the product.
The first versions of Dreamweaver and Cyberstudio were released in a similar timeframe. However, Dreamweaver eventually became the dominant WYSIWYG HTML editor in both market and mindshare. After the Adobe acquisition, GoLive was progressively re-targeted toward Adobe's traditional design market, and the product became better integrated with Adobe's existing suite of design-oriented software products and less focused on the professional web development market.
The Adobe CS2 Premium suite contained GoLive CS2. With the release of Creative Suite 3, Adobe integrated Dreamweaver as a replacement for GoLive and released GoLive 9 as a standalone product.
In April 2008, Adobe announced that sales and development of GoLive had ceased in favor of Dreamweaver.
. Most user interaction was done via a contextual inspector
rather than the modal workflow found in Dreamweaver. Among its features were a separate editor for tables that supported nesting, and a two-dimensional panel for applying CSS
styles to elements. GoLive supported drag-and-drop
of native Adobe Photoshop
and Adobe Illustrator
files via what the company called "Smart Objects", which then automatically guided the user through saving those files in web-supported formats. Updates to the original Photoshop or Illustrator assets were automatically tracked by GoLive. It also implemented a tool called "Components" which allowed updates to interface elements throughout a site to be updated globally by changing One single File. As a web site management tool, GoLive allowed users to transfer and publish content directly from within the application, and allowed individual files to be excluded from uploading.
, this feature was greatly enhanced in GoLive 6, adding support for the PHP
language and several databases. Despite being technically innovative, Dynamic Link was complex to use and somewhat buggy, and Adobe chose to drop the feature from the subsequent GoLive CS release. Adobe was widely criticised for this move in the press, which also caused consternation with many GoLive users, who feared that Adobe was abandoning professional web designers.
GoLive had a powerful set of extensibility APIs
which could be used to add additional functionality to the product. The GoLive SDK
provided interfaces which allowed developers to use a combination of XML
, JavaScript
and C
/C++
to create plugins for the product. Unusually, the extensibility API allowed developers access to custom drawing and event handling using JavaScript, as well as a full JavaScript debugger
and command line interpreter. This allowed intermediate-level developers using interpreted
JavaScript
to create sophisticated user interfaces, the creation of which is normally reserved for developers using compiled languages such as C
.
in the C++
programming language
. It is unusual in that instead of using a standard C++ framework such as PowerPlant
or MFC
, GoLive uses a custom C++ framework called SCL (Simple Class Library) which was initially built from scratch by the engineers at GoLive Systems Inc. The SCL framework was also used in the short-lived Adobe Atmosphere
3D software.
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
HTML editor
HTML editor
An HTML editor is a software application for creating web pages. Although the HTML markup of a web page can be written with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience and added functionality. For example, many HTML editors work not only with HTML, but also with related...
and web site management application from Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
. It replaced Adobe PageMill
Adobe PageMill
PageMill was a software program published by Adobe Systems for editing web page HTML in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get fashion. It was one of the first such editors.-History:...
as Adobe's primary HTML editor and was itself discontinued in favour of Dreamweaver. The last version of GoLive that Adobe released was GoLive 9.
Adobe GoLive originated as CyberStudio, the flagship product of a company named GoLive Systems, Inc. then based in Hamburg, Germany. Adobe purchased GoLive in 1999 and re-branded the GoLive CyberStudio product to what became Adobe GoLive. Adobe opened a new Hamburg office to house the development team, which was kept largely intact after the Adobe acquisition and continued to develop the product.
The first versions of Dreamweaver and Cyberstudio were released in a similar timeframe. However, Dreamweaver eventually became the dominant WYSIWYG HTML editor in both market and mindshare. After the Adobe acquisition, GoLive was progressively re-targeted toward Adobe's traditional design market, and the product became better integrated with Adobe's existing suite of design-oriented software products and less focused on the professional web development market.
The Adobe CS2 Premium suite contained GoLive CS2. With the release of Creative Suite 3, Adobe integrated Dreamweaver as a replacement for GoLive and released GoLive 9 as a standalone product.
In April 2008, Adobe announced that sales and development of GoLive had ceased in favor of Dreamweaver.
General description and distinctive aspects
GoLive incorporated a largely modeless workflow that relied heavily on drag-and-dropDrag-and-drop
In computer graphical user interfaces, drag-and-drop is the action of selecting a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object...
. Most user interaction was done via a contextual inspector
Inspector window
An inspector window is a type of computing window that shows current parameters of a selected object and allows these parameters to be changed on-the-fly...
rather than the modal workflow found in Dreamweaver. Among its features were a separate editor for tables that supported nesting, and a two-dimensional panel for applying CSS
CSS
-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
styles to elements. GoLive supported drag-and-drop
Drag-and-drop
In computer graphical user interfaces, drag-and-drop is the action of selecting a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object...
of native Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop...
and Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. Illustrator is similar in scope, intended market, and functionality to its competitors, CorelDraw, Xara Designer Pro and Macromedia FreeHand....
files via what the company called "Smart Objects", which then automatically guided the user through saving those files in web-supported formats. Updates to the original Photoshop or Illustrator assets were automatically tracked by GoLive. It also implemented a tool called "Components" which allowed updates to interface elements throughout a site to be updated globally by changing One single File. As a web site management tool, GoLive allowed users to transfer and publish content directly from within the application, and allowed individual files to be excluded from uploading.
Features
One of the new features of GoLive version 5 was Dynamic Link, which was a method of creating dynamic, database-driven web content without the need to know a server-side language and with full WYSIWYG support in the GoLive UI. Initially very basic and supporting only Microsoft's Active Server PagesActive Server Pages
Active Server Pages , also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated Web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic...
, this feature was greatly enhanced in GoLive 6, adding support for the PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
language and several databases. Despite being technically innovative, Dynamic Link was complex to use and somewhat buggy, and Adobe chose to drop the feature from the subsequent GoLive CS release. Adobe was widely criticised for this move in the press, which also caused consternation with many GoLive users, who feared that Adobe was abandoning professional web designers.
GoLive had a powerful set of extensibility APIs
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
which could be used to add additional functionality to the product. The GoLive SDK
Software development kit
A software development kit is typically a set of software development tools that allows for the creation of applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform.It may be something as simple...
provided interfaces which allowed developers to use a combination of XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
, JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
and C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
/C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
to create plugins for the product. Unusually, the extensibility API allowed developers access to custom drawing and event handling using JavaScript, as well as a full JavaScript debugger
Debugger
A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs . The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an instruction set simulator , a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered but which...
and command line interpreter. This allowed intermediate-level developers using interpreted
Interpreted language
Interpreted language is a programming language in which programs are 'indirectly' executed by an interpreter program. This can be contrasted with a compiled language which is converted into machine code and then 'directly' executed by the host CPU...
JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
to create sophisticated user interfaces, the creation of which is normally reserved for developers using compiled languages such as C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
.
Language and framework structure
Adobe GoLive is codedSource code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
in the C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
. It is unusual in that instead of using a standard C++ framework such as PowerPlant
PowerPlant
PowerPlant is an object-oriented GUI toolkit, application framework and set of class libraries for Mac OS, created by Metrowerks. The framework was fairly popular at the height of the Classic Mac OS era, and was primarily used with CodeWarrior...
or MFC
Microsoft Foundation Class Library
The Microsoft Foundation Class Library is a library that wraps portions of the Windows API in C++ classes, including functionality that enables them to use a default application framework...
, GoLive uses a custom C++ framework called SCL (Simple Class Library) which was initially built from scratch by the engineers at GoLive Systems Inc. The SCL framework was also used in the short-lived Adobe Atmosphere
Adobe Atmosphere
Adobe Atmosphere was a software platform for interacting with 3D computer graphics. 3D models created with the commercial program could be explored socially using a browser plugin available free of charge. Atmosphere was originally developed by Attitude Software as 3D Anarchy and was later bought...
3D software.
Release history
| Version | Code Name | Supported Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gonet GoLive Pro 1.0 | Classic Mac OS | August 1996 | |
| GoLive CyberStudio 1.0 | Classic Mac OS | April 1997 | |
| GoLive CyberStudio 2.0 | Classic Mac OS | September 1997 | |
| GoLive CyberStudio 3.0 | Classic Mac OS | April 1998 | |
| Adobe GoLive 4.0 | Classic Mac OS | January 1999 | |
| Adobe GoLive 4.0 | Microsoft Windows | May 1999 | |
| Adobe GoLive 5.0 | Classic Mac OS, Microsoft Windows | August 2000 | |
| Adobe GoLive 6.0 | The 6th Day | Classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows | February 2002 |
| Adobe GoLive CS | Se7en | Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows | October 2003 |
| Adobe GoLive CS2 | Reloaded | Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows | April 2005 |
| Adobe GoLive 9.0 | Vicious | Universal Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows | June 2007 |
External links
- Adobe GoLive homepage
- OReilly Article with GoLive History
- mprove: Adobe GoLive’s Point & Shoot - an interface technique for creating hyperlinks
- Adobe GoLive Tutorials & Resource Site
- GoLive CS2 Tutorials and Reference
- GoLiveCentral - Tutorials & Resources
- PayPal eCommerce Extension for Adobe GoLive
- Revive GoLive Adobe Forum