During my time as a Notes developer (mostly as an independent contractor/consultant) I have had the chance to work with a large number of companies on four separate continents. In all that time I cannot remember a single client in which the Notes development was ever considered "strategic". In fact, in many, the attitude towards Notes was (and often still is) decidedly hostile. So if Notes is often seen (unfairly?) as the ugly duckling in the programming world, why is there so many Notes databases out there and so many Notes developers still being employed?
One of the reasons for this seems to be that fact that unlike many other development platforms, Notes has always extended down to reach many people who would not be typically classified as programmers. People can start out with a Notes template such as TeamRoom or Discussion Library and get a small application up and running pretty quickly. These same people then find that with little or no formal programming experience they can add a few fields to a form, add another column to a view or even create a whole new view from scratch. Then using nothing more than a few simple forms, views, and little bit of @functions and @commands a whole new application can be built to automate a task that may have outgrown an Excel spreadsheet or fits some new process. A few of the more adventurous "non-programmers" even find some basic LotusScript within their capabilities. To a seasoned Notes programmer many of these applications look decidely ugly and badly written but they are highly effective. They provide the basic functionality that is needed by the business and because they have usually flown underneath the radar screen nobody has bothered to question whether Notes is the right tool to use.
It is usually only when the application breaks, the creator leaves/transfers, or there is a need to enhance the application that it suddenly appears on the radar screen of a Notes development group. As a developer I often get assigned to work on applications that were orginally developed this way. Whilst I may be tempted to curse the bad design, inefficient code, and the fact a production application is running on a development server, I can also be thankful that another business process has found a home in the Notes development arena giving me work and the chance to show what Notes can really do! I have worked for some companies with as many as 80,000 non-mail databases of which less than 20% were ever supported by a Notes development group!
This feeder base of applications is an important part of the Notes development food chain. Without these applications many companies may have been able to contemplate a life without Notes (and Notes programmers).
I am not sure if the role of this type of development is fully recognized when the future of Notes is being mapped out. Few of these "non-programmers" are represented on the various forums such as IdeaJam, Planet Lotus, and IBM's Notes discussion forums. And they probably are not heavily represented at events like LotusSphere. And they almost ceratinly do not get to be design partners evaluating the latest release of Notes.
With the Notes 8.5 beta having been released I have started to wonder what impact the new development tools and environment may have on Notes "non-programmers". A full-time developer (especially one who has developed with Java), probably loves the move of Designer to eclipse. Notes developers who have long struggled with design issues such as joining views or developing Notes/Web client or Web only applications probably love the new capabilities of X-Pages and the extended JavaScript language. The Notes development world is beginning to look a lot more like Java and ASP.Net development environments. But are these capabilities going to attract more "non-programmers" or less? IBM have not yet made public too much about what the Notes development environment will look like post Notes 8.5 but it does seem like eclipse will at least be part of that. My hope is that in acquiring some of the tools that Java and .Net developers take for granted we do not take the Notes development environment out of reach of the "non-Notes" programmers. At least not until more companies understand that Notes truly is a strategic platform and it is OK to make it the #1 choice for developing many applications.
0
6
0
1 Henning Heinz Permalink I am a bit surprised that you bring this up because what you decribe was my experience more during the R4 days when Designer wasn't locked and everyone could give it a try because it came with the client. Since IBM put more pressure on client licensing I saw more and more companies doing client only installations keeping away Power users from getting into Notes (yes, I know there are still ways to get around it).
While I agree that the code often is/was awful it also helped to
raise Notes acceptance. The applications came from the users, the
people that nowadays often complain that the client does not work
their way.
Although I have my doubts that IBM will make use of it, the
perspectives concept of Eclipse would fit quite well to distinguish
between the different skill levels and tasks.
If it is just about Notes becoming a strategic platform for
development then I am quite optimistic that every Java shop
benefits from the mix of DB/2, Eclipse and the scaled down parts of
IBM Workplace. There is a lot of support for this strategy. The
ones that do not agree just move away.
2 Ian W Randall Permalink Peter, I am hoping that Lotus begins to provide more and more end-user oriented development capabilities to normal Notes End users.
Adding better development tools for professional developers is
great, but the real strength of Notes for me has been the ability
for normal end users to develop very simple solutions without the
need to get a professional developer involved.
Sure some of these applications don't look very pretty and can be
difficult to maintain and support, but better that than for end
users to have to wait months or years for a professional solution
that ends up not being what the end user wants or needs.
However a good way to start is for Lotus to provide a reasonably
comprehensive library of standard templates, which are designed to
work with each other or stand-alone. After all this is one of the
factors that in the popularity of SharePoint.
By providing some "out-of-the box benefits" from a well designed
template library in Notes, it encourages productivity and
demonstrates best practices for interface design and ease of use.
Even seasoned professional developers would benefit from such an
initiative.
But by allowing end users to make simple changes and enhancements,
it leverages some of the real strengths of the Notes platform,
flexibility and extendability.
Why not also extend some of the XPages functionality also out to
end users (at least those components of XPages that doesn't require
any actual coding).
While they are at it, why not provide better integration between
Notes and the Symphony Applications, but specifically focussed for
the end user. Why should an end user not be able to display Notes
data through a Symphony Graph with a simple wizard, likewise for
integration between Notes & Symphony for mail merge. Why not
provide this integration also through a web browser. And why aren't
the Symphony Document editor, Spreadsheet or Presentation editors
available as alternative rich-text editor for Notes mail and any
rich-text field in any Notes database? And why isn't ODF the
default internal data format in all Notes documents?
3 Nathan T Freeman Permalink You're thinking of the wrong toolkit for the modern power user. It's not Designer. It's the composite app editor, Lotus Mashups, LiveText and Widgets. The Lotus vision is that these become the user empowerment tools, while Designer addresses the needs of sophisticated development.