Although I don’t really use Adobe Dreamweaver for web development (although if i’m doing interface design where I need a quick way to alter and view CSS changes fast I do) a friend of mine the other day (who uses Dreamweaver heavily) wanted to know how to re-enable the old JSP (Java Server Page) support in Adobe Dreamweaver CS 5 as Adobe removed the JSP support in Dreamweaver CS4 (I believe, may be a slightly older version they removed it however.)
A couple of months ago I developed a secure members system for him in Java (JSP’s and some Java Beans too) using my favourite IDE… NetBeans, he however wanted to make some visual changes to the JSP files and likes to use the ‘Live View’ mode in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, so I found out how to re-enable this functionality (although not officially supported by Adobe) and so thought I’d share it here and also explain how to add the latest MySQL J/Connector to be able to work in Dreamweaver as he needed that for the ‘Live View’ too.
To re-enable ‘JSP support’ in Adobe Dreamweaver
- Open up the Adobe Extentsion Manager
- Click on ‘Install‘ (to install a new plugin)
- Browse to and select the following file: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Dreamweaver CSx\configuration\DisabledFeatures\JSP_Support.mxp” and ‘Install‘ that extension.
- …your done, open Adobe Dreamweaver and your good to go!
To add the MySQL J/Connector for Adobe Dreamweaver
Unlike running your Java web application on Tomcat or another Java application server such as GlassFish etc. Dreamweaver looks in a certain place in the Dreamweaver folder to get its plugin’s to work within Dreamweaver, so when developing with Dreamweaver and JSP and if you rely on a MySQL database (or any other Java libraries for example the IBM DB2 database driver etc ) you’ll need to add these to the folder ‘JDBCPlugins’ in the Dreamweaver folder on your system otherwise you’ll probably see an error message like so:-
“org/gjt/mm/mysql/Driver” class not found
So lets begin…
- Firstly download the latest MySQL Connector/J from MySQL here: (http://www.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/), at the time of writing I downloaded (
mysql-connector-java-5.1.18.zip) - Extract the JAR (Java archive) file named ‘mysql-connector-java-5.1.18-bin‘ from the downloaded archive to “{Dreamweaver Folder}\Configuration\JDBCDrivers\“.
- Re-open Adobe Dreamweaver and you should now be able to use the MySQL JDBC driver in Adobe Dreamweaver.