Since its inception, the web has evolved from a repository of hyperlinked information for researchers and institutions to a playground for hard core techies and developers to a popular electronic medium for graphic artists and designers to an ongoing experiment in eCommerce and now to a brave new Web2.0 universe.

Because of this evolution, developers, designers, and content providers have been forced to forge a closer and closer relationship with each other in order to bring more functional, more interactive, and more compelling Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to life. This reluctant relationship has been rocky at times, and some have even tried to circumvent it altogether by having developers try to do design and designers try to do development, but in order for the Web2.0 to grow and flourish, we need to bridge the gap between these differing skill sets.

The best way to bridge this gap is by providing a suite of tools that enable designers and developers alike to feel comfortable and to get their work done in a easy and timely fashion. So now let's look at some of the current tools and technologies to see how they are (or are not) meeting the needs of both designers and developer:

(D)HTML + JavaScript/Ajax

One benefit to these technologies is that they have been around since the early days of the internet and so because of that there are probably more people that know these technologies than any other. One may also make the assumption that since these technologies have been around for so long that there must be some great, mature tools for working with these technologies. Unfortunately I personally don't feel that to be the case.

Sure there have been many attempts to create such tools including everything from WYSIWYG, designer focused tools to full blown developer suites including tag and code completion. The problem is that HTML (which is the fundamental basis for these technologies) was not designed to be a rich application technology, rather it has been pushed into that role due to the ubiquity of the browser.

As a matter of fact one could argue that the tools that have been developed to work with these technologies have never really been a good fit for designers nor developers but that both have merely put up with the tools so that they could get their jobs done. Even worse, very few tools that work with these technologies make it easy for both designers and developers to work on the same application in a cooperative fashion.

In the last few years, there have been many attempts to make developing with these underlying technologies a little easier by providing tools that let users visually lay out HTML/Ajax components. Although these tools have probably made developers lives a little easier when trying to do the job of a designer the tools still don't do a good job in allowing developers and designers to work together. This ultimately leads to designers having to create mock ups of applications in their tools of choice and developers attempting to use their own tools to attempt to create a working version of those mock ups.

Adobe Flash/Flex

Flash has long been a favored technology of designers because the tools that are used to develop Flash content were created with designers in mind. The Flash authoring tools focus heavily on timeline based content creation with animation transitions between key frames. For more application like behavior, Flash relies on a programming language called ActionScript which although based on ECMAScript is not (at least to my knowledge) used outside of Flash/Flex technologies. ActionScript allows designers the ability to take on the role of a developer when they wish to add additional behavior to their Flash applications that cannot be done simply by visually manipulating elements on a timeline.

Developers have traditionally shyed away from Flash because the authoring tools are so heavily focused on designers and because they are unfamiliar with ActionScript and do not want to learn what they view is a programming langugage that is very specific to Flash. Adobe has attempted to help bridge the gap between designers and developers with their Flex technology which is based on Flash but adds some more traditional UI components such as charting and graphing and comes with a more developer friendly development tool based on the Eclipse platform.

In my opinion Flex is on the right track to bridging that gap between developers and designers but because Adobe appears to be marketing Flash and Flex as different technologies and their seems to be some gaps in being able to use both products easily on the same application, there is still some distance to go before the designer/developer gap is fully bridged.

Microsoft Silverlight

Although Microsoft attempted to break into the RIA space with ActiveX, even back before RIA was a coined term, ActiveX suffered from a general lack of widespread adoption (the reasons for which I will not get into here). Microsoft has decided to once again take a shot at this space with its Silverlight technology.

Microsoft is really attempting to go head to head with Adobe's Flash/Flex technologies with Silverlight. Similar to Adobe, Microsoft has decided to create complementary tools that are geared towards designers (Microsoft Expression Studio 2) that are more visually based and timeline based and tools that are geared towards developers (Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Silverlight Tools).

Microsoft has also given a lot of thought to how to get these different tool sets to work together. To that end, Microsoft has opted to use a form of XML called Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) as the intermediary language between the toolsets. At this point in time the use of XAML probably makes Microsoft's tools the best choice for bridging the gap between designers and developers working on the same project.

Java/JavaFX

Like Microsoft Java was an early entry in the RIA space with Java Applets even before RIA was a coined term. Java Applets also suffered from a general lack of widespread adoption and so Sun too has decided to once again get back into the RIA space with its JavaFX technology. Unfortunately at this time JavaFX is still very much a new technology and as such does not have much in the way of tools other than some integration with the NetBeans IDE. I actually have written a separate blog about JavaFX which you can read at http://www.riaspot.com/blogs/entry/Will-JavaFX-become-a-viable-RIA-technology-