Design seemed to figure directly into business results. Here’s a short money quote –

The productivity gains from polishing the user experience are well worth the cost of going beyond the first design that comes to mind.

Of the 10-12 people there, three of the group’s mainstays had just returned from Drupalcon — the big Drupal developer’s conference in Barcelona.

As they ran down the list of the cool stuff they saw, they mentioned the new Flex Showcase that Adobe revealed at the conference — built on top of Drupal with Flex as the presentation layer.

Folks brought it up on their laptops and seems genuinely impressed — A few piped up with the question, “This is cool but what is Flex?”

And that’s the point in the evening when I saw Adobe’s strategy of engaging this particular developer community begin to pay dividends.

I chimed in and gave a summary of Flex — that it’s a developer friendly way to build Flash applications — to which many of the folks said, “Ahhh, that’s why I haven’t heard of it, Flash, it’s closed source, right?”

I got to detail that while the Flash Player is not open source, the Flex framework is and that there is a free SDK that can be used to build Flex apps. Also mentioned the Tamarin project and how the high performance Javascript engine from Flash had been open sourced and would provide the Javascript functionality for the next version of Firefox.

The picture this particular Drupal community got is that not only does Adobe share some of their ‘open’ ethos — it’s also actively making it easier to do cool stuff (like the Flex Showcase) in their native environments (text editors, not timelines).

And with that, Flex made an inroad into one of the most vibrant developer networks I’ve gotten to know over the last couple of years.

Drupal has a great community of folks like this around the Northwest — and it was cool to see Adobe turn a corner with them, not through marketing ’schlock’ or shilling for ’boutique’ sites, but through honoring diverse business models and solving people’s dev problems.

This is the same kind of strength that Microsoft’s Silverlight plays to in the ginormous .NET developer community. With the CLR coming in Silverlight 1.1, Microsoft is tapping into the shared ethos and “how can you solve my problem” of theis massive developer group that will likely make or break its Silverlight play.

No matter who you think wears the black hats or the white hats in this discussion, RIA developers everywhere would rather spend their time building cool and robust tools for their users than fighting cross browser CSS rendering and multiple javascript runtimes.

The popular IBM developerWorks site has started a new series entitled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”. After reviewing numerous open source packages such as Typo3, Mambo, and the ever-hyped Ruby on Rails, they “decided to use Drupal”.

More details at Drupal.org and IBM.

I particularly liked the detail of their selection process comparison of Drupal, Mambo, Typo3, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type, WordPress, and TextPattern.

I was recently at Drupal Camp in Seattle and have to say that I loved getting to know some of the developmers in the community — very cool (and active) bunch of folks.