Recently we’ve been having general discussions on the workflow in agile development projects. How can we make our development pipelines as effective as possible for our developers and designers? One product trying to address this is Adobe’s Flash Catalyst.
Flash Catalyst aims towards allowing for importing a ready-made Photoshop file with a site design to a workbench, where various functionality can be added easily: new pages, visual effects (transitions) etc. It all sounds really nice, as it makes it easy to convert a design into a real application with functionality.
It’s giving me the creeps
It’s pretty much at this moment I really start getting the creeps. To me, WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editors have never been anything but bad. They’re of course easy-to-use, but generally produce crappy code that infects your application like a virus. The code debt increases exponentially by the minute (OK, maybe I’m exaggerating again…) and in the end, you’ll lose control of your application.
This might be OK in one-time-development applications such as ads, campaign sites etc, but in our world, we can’t really afford creating our applications from scratch all the time. It’s really important to create good, reusable code in order to stay on top. And from what I’ve seen this far, that is nothing that’s done by using tools like Flash Catalyst (or even Flex?).
It’s important to stay in control
We mostly build large applications with quite advanced features and we need to be able to maintain in control of the code, as the risk of producing nasty bugs increases with the size of your application. If you’re using a UI based tool like Flash Catalyst, it’s very likely that you will have a lot more trouble finding where the issue really is than if you’ve got yourself a well-written code base.
In my opinion – when working with applications like ours’ – the development velocity is not more important than having a well-developed application.
I’m not saying it’s worthless…
As with everything, I can’t really say that it’s crap before we’ve tried it out for real. I just don’t think we’ll be able to rely on it for our bigger games, given what I’ve read and the demos I’ve watched this far. But maybe we can use Flash Catalyst for marketing campaigns (i.e. ads) and smaller prototypes of our applications? That would probably be a more logical way to use it.
Please prove me wrong; it’d be awesome if designers could implement their changes while not ruining my code… 
Some references
Chris Griffith’s thoughts on FC (and some comments on his thoughts)
Thanks for the post. Designers won’t be able to ruin your code because you get control of everything. You’ll use a merge tool to bring in whatever the designer changes in Catalyst. I think that most development shops will find their own ways around the workflow. Catalyst makes a great FXG editor and I think it will be pretty easy for developers to bring FXG changes into the components without interfering in what you’re doing.
I’d love to hear from you after we release the public beta on what you think about it.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
… now posting on the correct original post.
To some extent you are contradicting your later posts here. Tools that speeds up the development cycle shortens iteration lenghts, giving the development team more time to rework and hopefully produce more value in the end.
I agree with you that many WYSIWYG tools creates crap, but I think the future is in this direction. Dunno if Catalyst is one of the good or the bad guys though.
Hey Ryan,
Thanks for the reply!
My ranting is mainly based on previous use of WYSIWYG editors (in which category I’ve placed FC).
My main concern is that “weird” (from a developer’s point of view) changes will be made in the Catalyst environment, which could cause regression bugs etc.
But maybe I just haven’t gotten a proper view of how Catalyst will work in a real production pipeline (?).
It’ll be interesting to test it for real, but my scepticism will remain until the beta proves me wrong.
(Moved from the other post
)
Maybe that’s why I wrote the post later?
On a more serious note; yes, if it works as intended it would truly speed up the iterations and give more value. But my ranting was mainly about me not believing it would work, given previous experiences of similar products…
But Adobe’s goal with Catalst is to improve productivity, so if they put enough effort in it, maybe it’ll work? Let’s hope so.
Was at an Adobe seminar today which gave me more insight on FC. Making a new post on the issue…