XPages - The Good, The Bad and the UGLY - VII
More thoughts as I sat in XPage kindergarten today waiting for the bell to go.....
The Good: Diamonds Are A True Gem - Yesterday I spoke about the VERY VERY large number of components that can go into an Xpage design. It turns out that many of these attributes have little diamond icons next to them. In fact I would guess there are probably more diamonds contained in the XPage UI than there are in all the South African diamond mines combined. The diamond icon is used to denote each place in which a value can be provided either as a literal value or computed. So what this means is that it is now possible to dynamically set almost ANY attribute on an XPage design at run time. Ever want to set the width of a column or the column header label dynamically? Well now you can. Every want to dynamically disable (or even just disable) an edit control based upon another field value, well now you can. Ever want to change the color of text based upon the values on a form, well now you can. Did you ever wish the hide-when formula was a display-when formulae, well now it is. The formula language use to control these values is SSJS so you can make these formulae as complicated as you wish/need. If you are like me and you go out of your way to build a design element once in a way that allows it to be consumed by other other applications without the need to change any code then these diamonds are going to be a big help. Equally, if you like what Notes provides out of the box but just need to change one or two little things then diamonds can also be a big help.
The Bad: What Goes On In XPages Stays In XPages - A lot of the new features found in XPages such as diamonds could be of almost as much value in non-Xpage design elements. There is no sign at this time that any of these capabilities are likely to be added to existing design elements such as Pages, Forms, and Views. These may come at a later stage, but I would not be holding my breathe waiting. Notes 9.0 should provide a good insight. Watch to see the extend to which non X-Page design elements get enhanced. Idea Jam has hundreds of ideas about how. If they don't make it into this release they may never....
Random Thought: Does anyone know the history of XPages and where this design element came from? It strikes me that this design element has been developed in too great a level of detail to be a mere 1.0 release.
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Comments (5)
I don't think that the classic design elements will be enhanced anymore at the future, since there is no need to do so.
XPages will be available in the client, too, starting with 8.5.1.
So there is one unified design element for the web and the client,
with which we can create any UI we like. Why continue bothering
with forms and pages and such stuff?
XPages may be "1.0" in the Domino world, but as far as I learned
the underlying concept and code has quite a history in other IBM
products. And besides, below XPages there is a java server faces
fundation, a technique which is around for years now.
What Lotus did, and they did it very well, is to build java server
faces into Domino, make all the connections to the Notes backend
and create much nice glue to give the developers a productive tool
to work with.
oh, and BTW, have a look at http://www.youatnotes.de/xpages , there
I collect a lot of small code snippets and how-tos.
And another hint: if you want to master XPages, you have to master
Dojo, too.
And you cannot really learn Dojo with web ressources, since their
API documentation is totally crap. You need a book, and I recommend
the one from O'Reilly, It helped me a lot.
Peter, I think xPages comes from Workplace and that means they've probably put millions in it.
I mentioned it here before so I ask myself why you keep asking where XPages come from. XPages, as most what is put into Notes nowadays, is a leftover from IBM Lotus Workplace. It had a J2EE backend with an SQL datastore. There was an Eclipse based Designer client (IBM Workplace Designer) that at the end was called IBM Lotus Component Designer. You can read more about it http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/componentdesigner/.
It failed miserably and it was decided to put the good parts into
Notes and Domino (like they did with the Productivity components
and the Eclipse client). So IBM removed the SQL access and replaced
it with nsf and so comes XPages in IBM Lotus Notes. As it was a
product that only had little to do with Lotus Notes there is not
much integration with the "old" parts. And it failed once but tat
is something you all probably don't want to hear.
Now that Workplace is gone the strategy to just move old Workplace
stuff into Domino and sell it as the latest and greatest is
probably over. In theory you could still replace nsf with DB2 but
they failed in this area(not that they didn't try). So Notes and
Domino 9 will indeed be an interesting release because it probably
will be the first release that is able to move forward. Maybe this
reads a bit negative. It isn't meant that way. I am just a little
tired about IBM selling old stuff as new. The advantage is that
Workplace had such a big budget and manpower that whatever is put
into Notes and Domino is highly complex and very powerful. And I am
thankful to IBM that they kept the server part of XPages at a small
footprint.
@Henning - Thx for the background. I kind of suspected it might have been Workplace but had never seen this stated anywhere. It does help explain a lot about how we came to be where we are now.