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First, let me say... while I am not physically at Lotusphere, I am very much there in spirit.
As is always the case, there is a lot of great stuff coming out of the annual Notes community get together. And thanks to some great blogging those like me unable to attend are not too far out of the loop (Great work guys!).
If I had been in Orlando I am sure the highlight of the OGS would have been the Blue Man Group. Those guys rock. The rest of it didn't excite me too much. I am a dull boring developer who is turned on more by announcements about new design elements or extensions to programming languages rather than hearing the latest code names for projects that were announced at last year's LS. The following is my take on the the cool geeky stuff that has appeal for a Notes client developer like me....
OpenNTF:
Great news that IBM are getting behind OpenNTF . I see this as a huge win-win for all. I am looking forward to more details on how this will work. Eventually I would like to see all non-commercial Notes application templates developed through this community as I am sure some really cool things could be developed as joint efforts between the Notes gurus at IBM and the super cool Notes yellowbleeders out there. Hopefully IBM will resist the temptation to take too much control.
X-Pages
This is perhaps the biggest story at LS09. X-Pages is already out there in Notes 8.5, but for me the winning move was the announcement of X-Pages for the Notes client, QUICKR, and even Blackberry support. IBM you now have my interest. It seems to me like we Notes developers are now on the edge of a new Notes 2.0 era. I expect over time all those design elements we have used in the past will soon be superceded by the new X-Pages style of Notes application development. With support for Notes, Web, and Mobile clients the true power of Notes will be restored --- Rapid Application Development for multiple client types in a single application container (aka NSF) with integrated e-mail/PIM.
Mobile Devices:
There have been a number of announcements that collectively seem to show Notes as being a potential major player for mobile devices. BES is supporting Domino 8.5 a whole lot faster than Domino 8.0... X-Pages for the Blackberry...The addition of ActiveSync to Travelor to push Notes mail to the way cool iPhone, and I think I saw somewhere hints that Blackberry application development may soon become a part of Domino Designer. I expect many Notes developers will be spending the next few years expanding corporate applications to operate on mobile devices so it is great to see IBM and its partners are going to be helping us in that effort.
I am still waiting to be surprised by an announcement that IBM will breathe some life into LotusScript by extending the language to something more comparable to Java. Or at least to extend the capabilities of Java to operate client-side. Notes still is after all an application development platform and we need a boost to the programming environment to fully exploit the sexy new interface Notes 8.0 has given us. We simply cant drive a 800MB client with the same tiny engine we were using 10 years ago.
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