We’re happy to announce Jim Cheng as an addition to the Degrafa Team. Jim is a seasoned Flex/AJAX developer with a strong background in data structures and algorithms. He augments the Degrafa team with years of experience in performance optimization and file format parsers. Jim looks forward to improving the core framework as well as contributing new features.

As more developers dig into the Degrafa framework and provide feedback for new features and the broadening of current features, Jim is a welcomed addition to the team. He’ll be helping us out with core framework and helping us tackle some great new features we have planned for the next major release. We feel we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg of what this framework may be capable of.

Just as a reminder, you can log issues and enhancements concerning the framework at Google Code location. Thanks to everyone who has provided us feedback so far and kept us on our toes with questions.

We’d like to welcome Pavan Podila to the Degrafa team. Pavan has a strong background in WPF/XAML and has worked on complex UI designs and custom controls. He also developed the Illustrator to XAML exporter. Pavan feels Flex is very similar in principle to WPF, so he decided to get involved with Degrafa.

Pavan’s initial role with Degrafa will be direct parsing of SVGs (like those you might get out of Illustrator) into MXML Degrafa mark-up. Beyond that he’s looking to create a feature which will able to convert that MXML to XAML. Pavan is already moving at a rapid pace and we know his involvement will only add to the flexibility of Degrafa.

To learn more about Pavan’s work you can visit his WPF blog or his Flex blog.

As we got deeper into developing Degrafa, it became more apparent that all the features we want to include are more than just a couple of developers can handle. Ben Stucki expressed interest in adding to the Degrafa efforts in ways that can only be good. We’re glad to have Ben contributing, as it means we’ll be able to do more in a shorter time frame, like get the beta out.

A while back we mentioned CSS features for Degrafa, this is where Ben’s focus will initially lie. We know he’ll be able to take the CSS integration with Degrafa much further than we were anticipating on initially and add more to it. You can read more about some of Ben’s other projects on his blog.

We’re excited to announce that Andy McIntosh has joined the Degrafa development team. Andy has experience and passion in bridging the gap between designer and developer. His involvement will help us with Degrafa’s range of features, further optimize the framework and bring other perspectives on Degrafa’s capabilities. You can find out more about Andy on his blog.