And within 24 hours, Sun has released some workflow tooling for JavaFX 1.2.

I really think this rocks too.
It is tackling the workflow for designer and developer in a completely different way to what Adobe is with Flash Catalyst.

Adobe wants designers to:

1. Design in Photoshop/Illustrator
2. Load into Flash Catalyst
3. Tweak, add some behaviours etc
4. Load into Flash Builder (or use SDK) and code up the rest

To me this seems like adding in another application just to make life harder!
(and I dont really get where Flash IDE is going to fit in with this yet either).

Sun however has it much more straight-forward:

1. Design in Photoshop/Illustrator (amongst others)
2. Load into NetBeans (or use SDK) and code it up.

Sun have done a superb job with this suite of plugins.

However, what I find lacking is the ability to create a skin for a built-in control (such as for javafx.scene.control.Button). This will probably come in a future release and is certainly not essential as its fairly straight-forward now to create an entire GUI (or parts thereof) in Photoshop and code up the logic from the exported output.

This workflow also suits our particular company way better than Adobe’s workflow offering and I suspect we are not alone. We have great designers who spend every second of their day in Photoshop or Illustrator, and great programmers who spend their day in a text editor!

I really cant stress how happy we all are here and how much we are looking forward to using this new technology in production. We are writing applications for web, desktop and mobile that JavaFX can really help bridge the gap.

More soon.