Web Development Tools
- Details
- Written by Stan Coplan, Contributing Editor
{A little over 2 years ago Adobe systems bought Macromedia and added their Flash software to an already impressive repertoire of applications. Since then, there has been much discussion regarding what direction Adobe would take with this very popular development platform. Contributing Editor Stan Coplan adds his thoughts and expands on the web development tools sector for 2008. ed}
If you were worried about what Adobe would do with Macromedia's Flash and other tools fear not. Thermo is on the way. Will Thermo replace Flash? From what I can tell the answer is no. Thermo will produce output that feeds Flex Builder. Flex Builder is an Adobe programming tool used to produce the SWF files that play in flash. Thermo will take your layered Photoshop files as input and produce MXML (XAML) output for use in Flex Builder. MXML and XAML and similar XML formats are used to describe a user interface (UI) in a human readable but very structured format.
As part of the conversion process it is easy to transform a text field from Photoshop into a text-input field for Flex Builder. In fact there are many possible transformations available. This makes it very easy to convert a graphic design directly into a mix of graphics and programming components. So the hand-off from design to programming should be very smooth, much better than what we have available today, if Thermo lives up to its promise. It’s possible that MXML and XAML will replace CSS, and the browser will become a container for Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight. Of course, that could all be changed by new products like Adobe AIR that bridge the desktop-web divide.
