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Capabilities to integrate workflows between software developers and artists are being developed for NetBeans, Sun's open source IDE, Sun Vice President James Gosling said this week.
Speaking at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco on Monday, Gosling cited work going on to integrate workflows "between engineers and artists." Interviewed later in the week, Gosling said functionality is being developed on multiple fronts, including a capability to import items from applications such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Artists could build something that would be moved seamlessly back and forth into application development projects.
Gosling cited a trend in which software shops have both developers and artists. "One of the things that's interesting about the way a lot of these shops have gone is they've got two camps of people. They have the people who went to art school and the people who went to computer science classes," he said. There is not much overlap between these two groups' skill sets, although artists know scripting well, Gosling added.
"We're still working on a bunch of stuff with NetBeans to try to sort of integrate the workflow of these folks," Gosling said. Without this integration, artists and developers work separately and then may find out they are not on the same page with a project, he explained.
It is not certain yet when these workflow functions would be fitted into NetBeans. Gosling said he did not know if the fruits of this effort would be ready for a planned NetBeans 7 upgrade. Sun this week shipped version 6.1 of NetBeans.
Also at CommunityOne, a Red Hat official detailed plans to integrate OpenJKD into the Fedora Linux distribution via the Iced Tea project. OpenJDK, which constitutes the open source release of Java, would be installed by default on Fedora 9, said Thomas Fitzsimmons, a software developer at Red Hat.
Fedora 9 is slated for release on May 13.
Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld.
