The advisability of eating in your own kitchen is something you often hear about, but never does it make more sense than when applied in the world of software development. Why accept that service-oriented architecture is a must for your mission-critical backend systems, for example, if you find that the developer recommending such a trajectory does not personally make use of SOA?

From this month, as weve all seen, Adobe is very prominently eating in its own kitchen (its recently-acquired kitchen, I should say): it has relaunched Adobe.com which is now a mega-fusion of the original Macromedia and Adobe sites as a ColdFusion-powered site. All credit to whoever is behind this important and timely initiative: what better recommendation of a product can there be than that the company who owns it uses it not just in a customer-facing context, but in the customer facing context: the company web site?

Ben Forta, well known to ColdFusion developers worldwide, commented about Adobe.com's new look: "It's clean. The menus are intuitive. Downloads are all listed in one place. [There are] shortcut URLs (try www.adobe.com/coldfusion for example). Having products listed on the homepage is great."

The site switchover, which has energized both designers and developers, has been an object lesson in why I am so confident, along with many others Web-wide judging by the buzz evident throughout the blogosphere, that the whole that is Macromedia + Adobe is going to be shown over time to be considerably greater than the sum of its parts.

Think about it. This is the first time that developers and designers have been such close corporate bedfellows, at least at Adobe. This high-octane combination of two previously disparate communities is the fons et origo of the New Adobe, the rationale for the entire merger. And it is precisely why we have re-launched MX Developer's Journal this month as Web Developer's & Designer's Journal, with Adobe's close cooperation and involvement.

The ecosystem reflected in the magazine will, moving forward, be as vibrant as any new marriage. The fact is that developers have as much to learn from designers as designers do from developers. WebDDJ aims to aid and abet the honeymoon right away, and then over coming years mirror the rise of this great new combined company until its silver anniversary at least.

Next month it will be my pleasure to introduce you to the new editorial board, which we at SYS-CON Media are equally proud to say is backed and guided by a brand new International Advisory Board which reads like a "Who's Who" of some of the very finest interface designers and Web developers in the industry today.

The opportunity, presented by the coming together of two great companies, to widen and deepen the coverage we offer each month has proven too strong to resist, so hold onto your hats! Next month we'll be drilling down into just some of the welter of new topics, themes, and issues that the magazine will now be covering, in addition to almost everything we already covered for the past four years.

How Web Developer's & Designer's Journal takes shape over the coming months and years will, as always, be in large part a function of feedback from readers, too. We can most easily be reached by e-mail, just send your comments and suggestions to mailto:WebDDJ@sys-con.com?subject=Feedback.

Meantime, enjoy. We'll meet here again next month!