Developers vs. designers: Who wins?

It remains one of the thorniest problems in app-dev: How to get the folks in the blue shirts, khakis, and glasses to get along with their black-shirted, skinny-jeaned, faux-hawked neighbors down the hall? Like as not, your own answer largely depends on which side of the building you sit. Particularly for RIAs (rich Internet applications), where form and function share equal billing, team dynamics can make or bre

It remains one of the thorniest problems in app dev: How to get the folks in the blue shirts, khakis, and glasses to make nice with their black-shirted, skinny-jeaned, faux-hawked neighbors down the hall? Like as not, your own answer largely depends on which side of the building you sit.

Particularly for RIAs (rich Internet applications), where form and function share equal billing, team dynamics can make or break a project. Little wonder, then, that Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are all racing to market with new tools and platforms aimed at helping developers and designers meet each other halfway. Unfortunately, though well intentioned, these wonder products aren't likely to solve anything.

Adobe was arguably first to tackle the issue. Having cornered the tools market for graphics professionals, Flex Builder was its olive branch to developers. The AIR platform further legitimized Adobe's efforts, demonstrating that HTML, Flash, and ActionScript could be just as useful on the desktop as on the Web. More recently, the Open Screen Project aims to broaden the scope of the technologies to include mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other devices.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft entered the fray with Silverlight, its rival to Flash. Where AIR brought the Web to the desktop, Silverlight applies ideas from Windows Presentation Foundation to the Web. Rounding out the package, Microsoft's Expression suite of code-friendly graphics applications helps to smooth the gaps between program and presentation, leaving developers to fill in the details in Visual Studio.

Sun's JavaFX is the latecomer. Currently in beta, it aims to take the pain out of UI development in Java by adding a new, simplified scripting language and an accompanying media file format. In demos at JavaOne, Sun employees showed how designers could export JavaFX-compatible assets using plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, then quickly add behaviors using JavaFX Script. The process is not unlike working with JavaScript/CSS -- or Microsoft's XAML. Sun is also planning updates to its NetBeans IDE to help facilitate the process.