Having undertaken a review of the Notes 8.5 public beta I have decided that I will not be developing a version of the .domino framework for the 8.5 release. My current plans were (and still are) to release 1.0 of the .Domino Framework later this year that is fully supported with Notes 6.0+. After this initial release I had planned to then jump to Notes 8.5 and start developing functionality specific to this release.
I find Notes 8.5 to be a major disappointment for Notes client development and see no compelling reason to develop a version of the .Domino Framework for this release. For one thing there is little or no new features in this release specific to Notes Client functionality. The design elements such as X-Pages and Custom controls are supported on the Web client only. Then there is the new eclipse IDE which does a great job for these new design elements but leaves all the existing design elements worse off than before. (And don't get me started about the absence of an eclipse editor for LotusScript!!!). So until IBM starts to get fair dinkum with providing something new for Notes client development All post 1.0 releases of the .Domino Framework will be developed for the Notes 8.0 stream. This includes support for composite applications - something I am quite excited about. I suspect a lot of people will bypass this release of Notes anyway and wait for the REAL 8.5 release to become available.
0
0
3
1 Ben Poole Permalink In fairness, the 8.5 release has ALWAYS been aimed at Domino web developers, rather than those doing stuff with the client, in keeping with the release cycle for Notes and Domino generally -- and no-one can argue that Domino developers haven't been left out in the cold with successive releases.
But I know what you mean about limiting yourself to certain
releases, and that's fair enough too :o)
2 Nathan T Freeman Permalink While I obviously can't argue over issues like the missing LS Editor, there are some substantial gains for client devs even in the public beta. Try searching from a right-click in the outline, for instance.
3 Peter Presnell Permalink @Ben - I guess my expectations had been set incorrectly. I thought that 8.0 was about getting the Notes client back on track and that 8.5 would be addressing the needs of developers in general and not just Web developers. The LotusScript language has fallen way behind other languages such as Java and C# and we have seen very few ehancements to the Notes client since 6.0. As I see it, 6.5 was about integration with SameTime (good), 7.0 was more about IBM trying to sell DB2 to Notes customers (bad), and 8.0 addressed the need to stop everyone migrating their corporate mail client to Outlook (good). So if 8.5 is about Web development it would seem like the time of addressing the needs of Notes client development must be getting close - 5 years is a long time in the IT industry. Notes client development is still the core of the Notes offering and the one thing that is unique to Notes. I can do Web development in any number of alternate platforms but there is no other thick client out there as powerful as the Notes client.