We are so not an afterthought
Category lotusphere
I have seen the future... and it is awesome.
I've never been more thrilled to be proven wrong. Based on everything that I witnessed over the past week (enumerated in exquisite detail elsewhere), I feel confident in asserting that, if Domino developers were ever an afterthought, we're not any more.
Several folks I discussed this with over the last couple days have complained that it's still not enough; "too little, too late", and so on. I can respect that. They certainly made some valid points during those dicussions. But my primary concerns have been definitively addressed:
So the end result is that IBM has simply broadened the spectrum of what can be done within the platform. As always, the old stuff remains intact. Those who choose to develop the way that they always have are perfectly free to do so, and will be getting assistance by the end of the year in applying what they already know to deliver functionality and interfaces that will wow their users and/or customers. Those of us that are ready and willing to evolve are simply being given an even more ginormous space within which to grow. Lotus 911 has some ideas on how to assist that evolution... those of you who were at the conference may have gotten to see a bit of that up close, but I'll provide additional detail for broader consumption post haste.
I have seen the future... and it is awesome.
I've never been more thrilled to be proven wrong. Based on everything that I witnessed over the past week (enumerated in exquisite detail elsewhere), I feel confident in asserting that, if Domino developers were ever an afterthought, we're not any more.
Several folks I discussed this with over the last couple days have complained that it's still not enough; "too little, too late", and so on. I can respect that. They certainly made some valid points during those dicussions. But my primary concerns have been definitively addressed:
- I saw several ways in which IBM will be shielding the average developer from some behind-the-scenes complexity. For example, the fancy new "xPage" elements coming in 8.5 include the ability to make various controls Ajaxy with a simple checkbox... and specify what data will be retrieved via Formula. Not the relative path of an agent or servlet, not a JSON object... friggin' Formula, man. Doesn't get much easier than that. Widgets and Live Text are going to give us some additional capabilities that will likely be a bit trickier to implement, but not to the point that they won't be worth digging into. I think my only criticism is that typeahead for custom LotusScript classes is still "on the radar"... but, hey, I'll live. We're headed in the right direction, and I trust the momentum will continue to take us in that direction in the long term.
- Domino is finally going to be a first class web server again. But they're not locking us into Dojo. They'd already promised they wouldn't, but hadn't gone into much (yeah, okay, any) detail about how exactly we could leverage the same model they're taking with Dojo in alternate frameworks. As it turns out, they did exactly what I'd suggested, just at a deeper layer, which - for performance reasons alone (among others) - will probably be far better than the specific model I'd espoused. Granted, it's going to require a larger investment of time, energy and research (hint, start reading up now on JavaServer Faces) to cater to an alternate framework. Oh, and you'll have to choose one per server rather than per application (Bob, smack me if that assumption is incorrect). So while this type of customization will probably be best suited for OpenNTF / BP's, theoretically any customer will be able to modify the HTML rendering engine... or even swap it out with an entire replacement engine.
So the end result is that IBM has simply broadened the spectrum of what can be done within the platform. As always, the old stuff remains intact. Those who choose to develop the way that they always have are perfectly free to do so, and will be getting assistance by the end of the year in applying what they already know to deliver functionality and interfaces that will wow their users and/or customers. Those of us that are ready and willing to evolve are simply being given an even more ginormous space within which to grow. Lotus 911 has some ideas on how to assist that evolution... those of you who were at the conference may have gotten to see a bit of that up close, but I'll provide additional detail for broader consumption post haste.
Comments
No - us developers weren't forgotten, but I don't think that we ever really were.
See, the majority of the RAD/RAD+ development community that I've talked to complain about functionality that is basically already built into the product... if you know what you're doing. That's the great thing about these products - the options ARE there to do what you want to do yesterday, today, and tomorrow!
Posted by Chris Toohey At 11:55:35 On 01/27/2008 | - Website - |
whaaaat? r u sure? i thought they were definitely putting that IN there... that is the ONE thing we've been asking for, for years and years, consistently, every time they asked what we wanted in Designer...
say it ain't so man...
Posted by John Vaughan At 18:04:40 On 01/27/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Tim Tripcony At 18:58:37 On 01/27/2008 | - Website - |