For those of you who took yesterday off and missed all the excitement generated by the posting of the following
YouTube video about a new product code-named bones developed by Lotus911
If you are a Notes developer and you have not yet watched this 20 times please do yourself a favor and watch it closely. Not because you may ever be in the market for, or find yourself developing. applications for the healthcare industry but for the way this should challenge your thinking about what a Notes application is and how a Notes application should look. I was already excited about my company upgrading my work environment to Notes 8.5 next Monday. But this video, and related information posted about it, has completely challenged my thinking yet again about what I could/should be striving for with my own Notes applications. Something Mr NTF (Nathan T Freeman) has been known to do on a regular basis! When I first watched the video I was in the office and had the sound on my workstation turned down, so I missed the introduction. As I started to watch it I was quite impressed with the application but was a little displeased that Nathan had clearly moved on from Notes development into the traitorous world of Non-Notes development. What on earth was he doing???? Oops I may have been a little wrong there....
This application is simply brilliant at a number of levels:-
1) User Interface
The effort that has gone into the visual display and the human interface is amazing. In my opinion it is right up there with some of the slick things Apple have done with the iPhone. That device is an iPhone on steroids. Even without the plugin.xml tweaks to hide components of the Notes client, it is hard to recognize the Notes elements which have been so nicely rendered using Eclipse SWT controls. I am sure I will be racking my brains for the next 12 months trying to figure out how to do some of that stuff.
2) Software Engineering
This is so unlike any Notes application I have every seen before, I can't help but think that it took the collective minds of a lot of the gurus over there at Lotus911 to actually put this together. (and perhaps access to the 8.5.1. Notes client beta to make it work?). I can't wait until Nathan and others start to share some insights into how some of this was done. I suspect over time the Notes Development community will learn a lot from the snippets of information that are made available about how this was done.
3) Complete Solution
This application was way more than just a Notes database with an awesome UI stuck on top. Nathan had already done that before with Carousel. What I really liked here was how some of the key strengths of Lotus (Composite Applications, Eclipse, Data Encryption, Replication, and Foundations Server) were combined into an awesome low-maintenance SMB solution with an equally impressive piece of hardware with which to interact.
4) Productivity
"1 visual designer, 2 full-time devs,
2 part-time devs. 90 days so far."
I am dying to learn from Nathan why this application was being developed in Notes and not some other platform. I suspect part of the reason is that no other platform would allow something this slick to be developed in anywhere near this amount of time. And no matter what Lotus911's hourly rates are, I am sure the $$ cost is also quite impressive.
Congratulations to Nathan and the Lotus911 team for not only a great product but also helping to create a few cracks in the glass ceiling that has for so long prevented Notes application development from being taken seriously by IT executives as a real kick-arse application platform.
Disclaimer: Bones was developed by Lotus911 who sponsor bleedyellow and provide this blog site. If any of these comments look at all like serious sucking up to the sponsors of my blog --- this is purely coincidental (as I do all my sucking up in private).
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Comments (2)
"plugin.xml tweaks to hide components of the Notes client"?
Can you say more about this?
Thanks for the kind words, Peter. I honestly have no idea when we'll get to public communications about how everything works in Bones, but I hope it's not too far off. As you might imagine, there are serious business concerns over how much we can talk about. It's not an open source project (yet.) :-)
@Karsten - I can talk a bit about it. If you're willing to crack
open the JAR files in the Notes branding plugin that gives
Expeditor 6.2 it's Notes-flavoring in 8.5, you can find all kinds
of goodies in there. One of them is the plugin.xml that controls
the configuration of the client space. There are extension points
there to turn all kinds of things on and off, such as toolbars, the
status bar, the drop-down menus, the title bars, etc. There's even
a full on "kiosk mode" extension parameter.
Unfortunately, most of these don't work. Setting kiosk mode, for
instance, causes spectacular crashes on start up. Even suppressing
the status bar will cause of a lot of Java NullPointerException
dialogs in the client. These have to do with the client not yet
having proper error handling when some parts of the Eclipse
framework are missing.
Some things we're able to tweak via policies as well. For instance,
opening the Composite app on start up, hiding the toolbar and the
sidebar, and forcing minimal interaction when deploying a new
plugin.
Be aware that all of this tinkering should be done at your own
risk. I had to rebuild my Notes client at least 5 times on my test
system. It's not for the feint of heart.