OK, so there is more to 8.5.0 than XPages. The following are a few of my thoughts as they relate to my experiences with the new Domino Designer for Eclipse.
The Good: A Modern IDE - The old domino Designer IDE was getting very outdated. I had the opportunity to do development for a time with C# and .Net and hence can fully appreciate the power that a full-featured IDE like Visual Studio could bring. And while I loved getting back to RAD with Notes I do still miss the power of Visual Studio. I still don't see Eclipse as being anywhere near as powerful as Visual Studio but it sure narrows the gap. The old IDE did a great job when development consisted of Forms, Views, and Agents. With the addition of many additional design elements over the years and now XPages, Notes is now way more sophisticated and complex and clearly needs a tool like this. At the moment it is a little clunky with the need to accommodate all the existing "legacy"? design elements and their individual idiosyncrasies but I am hoping these will eventually be worked out. If you are like me and have not used Eclipse much in the past then there is a whole learning curve just with this new IDE to overcome in addition to learning XPages and SSJS. If you are a full time Notes developer then I am sure after you have used this new IDE for 3-6 months you will never want to go back to the old IDE.
The Bad: A Complex IDE - As a full-time Notes developer, and one who has used a tool like Visual Studio I am not as intimidated by DDE as I am of XPages and SSJS. On the other hand I am somewhat troubled that there will be a lot of non-programmers and part-time developers who will be completely intimidated by this new IDE. To me Notes has been the success it has been largely because of this class of developer. In my opinion Notes would not have survived being a mail client alone. Many companies I have worked with would have replaced Notes with Outlook a long time ago if they could figure out an easy way to replace all the Notes applications that proliferated so quickly because of these "programmers". How do these people view 8.5 and the new IDE? Are they ever likely to adopt XPages and/or SSJS? I recently blogged in a light-hearted way my own vision of how this might be solved. I think the challenge is certainly there for IBM in moving the Notes Development platform upmarket to compete with Java and .Net to find a way to ensure a significant component of the yellowverse is not lost.
The UGLY: Where's MY LS Editor? - We may as well cover this one final time for completeness. I am sure I am not alone in thinking that the single biggest disappointment with 8.5.0 was that IBM did not deliver a new LotusScript editor as anticipated. I am sure IBM had gotten the message that this was one thing being sought by the yellowverse more than almost anything else. To have not delivered simply means to me that IBM were not prepared to allocate enough resources to ensure it was completed in time. I can perhaps understand why. 8.5.0 was also the release in which IBM launched a new programming language in SSJS. So it was potentially an internal conflict to deliver a new programming language in the same relese as a new tool is made available that makes life easier to continue to develop applications in the established programming language - LotusScript. The good new is that IBM have publically announced that it will be there in 8,5,1. Because it is public knowledge I believe I am allowed to say that I have seen it and used it. I just wish I had it in 8.5.0. That would at least been some compensation for DDE 8.5.0 which feel a lot like the 8.0.0 Notes client - slow and fragile. Again those aspects will be addressed in 8.5.1.
Ratings
0
Comments (2)
Peter,
Although I agree with many opinions in your "The good the..."
series I would like to add my opinion to this post. First,
regarding the Eclipse IDE complexity, the user can just create a
new perspective simulating the old Designer IDE and use it until he
dares to begin with XPages development. He will get a very similar
tool to old Designer and he could use , or not, all the new
features that make Eclipse and state-of-the-art IDE.
Second, when you compare Visual Studio to Eclipse, I think you are
not making the right comparison. Eclipse, per se, is not anything
else than a framework. The comparison should be between Visual
Studio and Rational or Visual Studio and MyEclipse or Visual Studio
and any plugin developed on Eclipse. I think the real power of
Eclipse is the flexibility and extensibility that has made it the
target for almost all the IDEs in the software industry.
Miguel
@Miguel - True, I perhaps should of referred to My Eclipse or DDE. When I was referring to Eclipse I was meaning to cover the range of Eclipse-based IDE's. But I would still think that there are a lot of Notes "developers" who would be reluctant to go near any Eclipse IDE. To me these are people outside of traditional development platforms that turn to Notes because it is easy to consume. These are more like Excel, Access, and FileMaker power users than Java/C# programmers.