Beyond The Yellow Bubble

Still a quiet week on the xpage front.   I am a Notes client developer and the Web projects are few and far between.  So my focus this week has been using DDE to develop and maintain non-XPage applications.

The Good - It's Eclipse - Prior to DDE I had used Eclipse sparingly.  I have MyEclipse installed and used to edit the odd java program and also for CSS.  but I am told by people who's opinions I respect that outside of Visual Studio the development all IDEs are gravitating to is Eclipse.  So putting the "E" in DDE must be a great strategic move right!  So while some of this Notes stuff may seem a little strange to the uninitiated, non-Notes developers will at least feel at home with the Notes IDE.  For those people who support both Notes and non-Notes development will have the capacity to use similar IDEs.  And for those who do Domino Web Development, DDE 8.5.0 provides a much better CSS editor and the new XPages design element is showing the potential

The Bad - Oh sh*t - (Yes the * = "oo") - It may be Domino Designer 8.5.0 but for DDE it is really 1.0.0.  And boy it shows it at time.  Running on its own the Notes 8.5.0 client seems to be the best 8.x release yet in terms of performance and reliability.  But th Designer client is not quite there yet.  More than a few people have been complaining of the time it takes to open a database in Designer.  Yes there are ways to make this faster but after years of using a product habits do form that are hard to break.  since I ugraded to 8.5.0 16 days ago my workstation has had more restarts than a NSACAR race on a wet afternoon..  It always seems to be Deisgner that causes the problem.  And that's before we get to all the quirky issues of screen focus changing with both clients open and the Designer client reopening after it has beeen minimized etc.  The latest 8.5.1 beta is not perfect but it does seem to be a lot better.   I made a statement a long time ago that 8.5.0 was the release I hoped I would never have to use, I wanted to go straight to 8.5.1.  I didn't get my wish but if you do mainly Notes client development you won't miss much bypassing 8.5.0 other than the chance to start learning all this new stuff sooner rather than later.

The UGLY - Helpless -OK now... here's the scenario.  As developers we have a new IDE that we must get familiar with and changes to how the design elements are arranged.  We have a new design element in XPages that has probably more in it that all the other design elements combined and we also have a whole new programming language to potentially learn with SSJS....  That's a lot to learn   So if you are like me, now is the time more than ever we are going to be relying on on-line help (especially as their are no books yet on XPages and SSJS)... So why on earth did we need to go out and completely revamp the on-line help system at the same time. That seems to be at least one layer of change too many!  With my old help database I at least new how to use it and where to go to find stuff.   Especially as the new help system seems next to useless.  Most of the important stuff about all the old design elements doesn't seem to be in the new help system and the documentation on XPages is extrememly thin.  For some reason the new help system won't even open up many times.   I searched through IdeaJam and didn't find a single suggestion that we needed to replace the existing Help system so I can only conclude this change is being forced on us rather than responding to our needs.  It seems many people are now doing what I do, which is manually opening the old help database  IBM, this is one change I dont want at all - even if you do get it to work properly.  Please give us back the an updated version of the original Notes help database during this time when we all have so much to learn.