After a 3 part video regarding Thermo appeared in youtube many developers got excited about the product and started blogging about it. So FlexNotes also watched the video and read the blog posts with eagerness and anticipation.The author even had an imaginary conversation with a developer (referred to as D) proficient in many technologies as well as managing large scale projects. He also runs his own company.
Disclaimer: The conversation between FL and D that you are going to read is a work of fiction. It does not bear any resembalance to anyone living or dead in real world.Please stop reading further from the point where it starts hurting your feelings, sentiments etc.
FL: Do you know when Thermo is coming?
D(Dev) :No, we don’t.
FL: Have you really tried it out ?
D: No, but I have seen a video on the YouTube.
FL: But you have posted in your blog divdavdev.com that Thermo will generate bad code. How do you know that ?
D: Any such thing that is designer friendly is bound to produce bad code. Just like any WYSIWYG editor.
FL: Do you intend to use it in your organisation for developing RIAs, along with Flex builder?
D: Look, its a designers’ only product that helps a novice to draw a very fanciful image of an application in Photoshop and then import it and convert it into a working Flex project, of course by adding interactivity to it. So its only good for designers who do not know MXML or AS 3.0.But we don’t need it as we are very efficient in writing code in Flex builder to generate what we want.Hence WE do not need it.
FL: May be your designers will need it.
D: We don’t have a full time designer. Whenever we have any design requirements we just ask any freelancer to do it. That’s all.
FL: What do you do when design related change requests come from clients ? Do you send it to the designers again for changes ?
D: We try to do it ourselves. Once the main design has been done, it is easy to make small changes in Photoshop. Then again we always ask the clients to consider bad effects of changing UI such as increase in loading time, decrease in performance which will lead to more development efforts etc.
FL: Do the clients always agree ?
D: Most of the time they do.
FL: What happens if the client does not agree ?
D: We make necessary changes ourselves. Chink our best java developer knows Photoshop a little.We ask to him to make the small changes. He likes it. You should see his some of his photo editing capabilities in flickr.
FL: But RIA without designers does not sound very promising?
D: Actually we are trying very hard find very best designers, but so far we have no luck?
FL: What are your requirements ?
D: Very few. He should know Flex 2 (both MXML and Actionscripting) very well and must have some knowledge in one Server side language and should know one database.While we would be certainly happy if he has some experience in Swing, Hibernate or JSF but that is not mandatory. But he must know about design patterns.
FL: You expect a designer to know all that?
D: We want someone to work in our team with team spirit and all our team members are conversant with that.
FL: Do you think Thermo will introduce new way of developing RIAs?
D: It is difficult to say anything about that right now .
FL: It is being speculated that once Thermo comes out designers would take care of all design, UI and Interactivity related tasks which will leave developers to concern about all logic and database related things. Do you think this is possible ?
D: It is a very difficult thing to achieve because for that Thermo has to produce readable and maintainable code just as we developers do.
FL: And who says if the code is up to the standard ?
D: We.
FL: Are you afraid of the fact that once Thermo comes, some of the RIA market will go to designers or in some cases they will control a considerable portions of any applications to be developed using Flex ?
D: Let me make this very clear. We rule the enterprise application development world. Mere designers armed with Photoshop and Thermo can’t take it away from us. We won’t simply let them have any of it. They can keep learning and publishing nice tutorials in their pretty blogs but that’s it.
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December 3, 2007 at 10:15 am
Aral Balkan
Wow, I wish I knew which company D worked for — I’d hate to make the mistake of working with such stuck up sons of bitches. What as ass.
December 3, 2007 at 10:19 am
Aral Balkan
(Your converstation may be imaginary but you’d be surprised how many times I’ve actually heard some clueless self-absorbed “developer” make the exact same argument.)
December 3, 2007 at 11:21 am
barry.b
hang on… hang on … I’ve seen this all before somewhere …
(no, not Thermo so much as the division of labour and bias and snobbery)
VB5 and VB6 days, where you would have a “Forms” developer that would take the application design from the analyist and work with the UI up to the point of raising events.
The “back end guy” would take it from there, all the way back to the database.
what’s the main beef? generated code (= fat file size), which for something delivered in a browser is a fair cop (you couldn’t say that VB forms were “thin”
What else? fear of losing control/ground. Fear of designers dictating what the application is and how it works, just because they created the UI.
If the “UI guy” also designed the app (instead of the analyist), it would be a covoluted mess. If the back-end guy also did the UI, it was almost unusable.
personally, I’m quite happy to get the “UI guy” to do his stuff… provided I design the application first…
this “battle” has only just started, methinks…
December 3, 2007 at 4:12 pm
joeflash
Personally I think the whole argument of who gets to design what is a waste of time. I used to be a designer, trained in design, went to art school, yada yada. Back in ‘98 no one doing web apps knew anything about UI design on the web. We were all doing it by the seat of our pants. How did most of us learn UI design? By observing what works, what we personally find usable, as well as reading about emerging standards, and emulating that.
Now that I’m a developer through and through, and see things from a more code-centric viewpoint, I notice that although a lot of designers are trained in the tools they use, and are generally very good at design, many of them aren’t any better trained or experienced at UI design than a visually-oriented developer. So there’s a misconception out there that a) all designers made good good UI design, and b) all developers make bad UI design. I’ve see absolutely horrid UI design by very experienced people on both sides of the fence.
As a developer I might not be shy at tackling a UI design, but I’m very clear that I’m just guessing. If an enterprise level app were dependant on my UI design, I would definitely get an UI/Interaction designer on the case. Unfortunately this kind of approach seems to be lacking in both RIA designers and developers alike. And most of it, I think, is simply because traditionally, it has been left up to the “creative person” on the Flash project team to do any of the visual stuff, or to the “deseloper” to manage both UI design and development. For small to medium-scale projects this generalist approach works well; but when you get into large scale projects with dozens of people on a team, specialists will need to be brought in, if for no other reason than to guide certain aspects of the architecture, whether it be visual or data-oriented.
And really, so what if Thermo produces code that needs to be tweaked a little to integrate within a larger project framework? It’s not like we’re talking about designing an HTML site in Word or Front Page or anything: Adobe is well aware of this concern, and is addressing it. And would that not give more work for the developers to do, not less? Developers who feel threatened by Thermo need to get a clue. And clients (or designers) who expect to develop full-blown data-enabled applications in Thermo without a developer are also out to lunch. Tools don’t make good RIAs, no matter how sci-fi they get. Only a good team can do that.
But Thermo might, just might, enable the fledgling “one person web shop” to pump out a few decent applications for acme co., or a enterprise RIA project development team to shave the time required to skin and visually design a Flex/AIR app.
I guess the point I’m making is that neither the “designer” nor the “developer,” or even the architect or the interaction designer, should be in charge of the UI design to the exclusion of other people’s input, even though most large teams have a hierarchical structure. It’s got to be a team effort; the moment you start posturing and “excluding” specialities as this piece demonstrates, your project is doomed to failure.
This is such an obvious axiom of RIA development, I wonder if the entire piece was intended as satire, to illuminate just how ridiculous the designer/developer divide really is.
December 3, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Joeflash’s Enigmacopaedia » Thermo a Threat to Developers
[...] mostly by developers who have a chip on their shoulder about designers, as demonstrated by this fictionalized conversation with a developer about Thermo. (I gather the names have been changed to protect the guilty [...]
December 24, 2007 at 11:14 am
Anna
Well, I find it extraordinarily interesting.Good luck to all of you. And I’m sure you’ll do fine. Really. Just fine.