Johan's blog

Bringing designers and developers together with JavaFX

Although tools like NetBeans provide tools for constructing e.g. JSP's in a rather graphical way, it is very unlikely that web designers will use these tools. Designers typically want to use tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. In a number of projects, I have seen the graphical team delivering a number of images, that were then integrated in JSP's by the development team. When new versions of the images are delivered, they often have to be re-integrated in the JSP's.

This is not completely solved by what I saw yesterday, but there is hope. A designer was working on a Photoshop file, and a developer was working on animations with JavaFX. They used a plugin for Photoshop (also available for Illustrator) that allowed the designer to export the design for JavaFX. It required a USB stick to transfer the files to the developer's system, but once it was in the right location, he could use the different layers of the design as separate objects, and apply transformations and functionalities to this.

This was only a very basic integration, but at least it shows that the problem I often encounter (designers and developers using completely different tools) is recognized, and I do expect more work will be done on this topic.

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