Beyond The Yellow Bubble

The Good: Revealing Your Sources - so far we have covered a lot about the design capabilities and programming, but what about the data?  Again XPages is offering a lot when working with data than was never possible before in Notes.  In 8.5.0  XPages gives us the ability to connect to Notes databases using either a form or a view.  This is a lot like NotesSQL and I guess it gives IBM a way to convert the Notes document model into a set of fixed rows and columns that XPages can handle.  What is new to XPages is that we can define multiple data sources allowing a single Xpage to edit multipe documents.  Using the repeater control we can combine characteristics of views and forms together in a manner similar to some of the more sophisticated datagrid controls found in ASP.Net (e.g. Telerik Radcontrols).  To control the many edits Xpages has events for each Form and for the XPages itself.  And yes, there are usually diamonds found next to datasource definitions which means we also have the power to establish the data source to be used at run-time.

For Data Soures we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in 8.5.0.  The most recent presentations from IBM suggest future release will support connectivity to XML and relational data sources.  When this happens Notes developers are finally goling to be able to fight back.  If you're like me you have often have been on the defensive with Notes as a strategic platform.  Now you will be able to the provide the benefits of Rapid Application Design with the slickness of Xpages running on Web, Notes, and Blackberry clients, AND you will be able to tap into all that data in SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase databases and bring it together wioth Notes data.  IBM have tried to provide this a couple of times with LEI Virtual Activities and Notes2DB2 but these never delivered on the promise.  Lets hope we get there this time.  Note: There is an article in the Domino Designer Wiki that outlines how JDBC can be used even now to connect to Relational databases.  Sadly its not for people like me still in XPages kindergarten.

The Bad: All Browsers Are Not The Same: I still have a lot to learn about XPages and also DOJO but I had been kind of hoping that XPages would dramatically reduce the issues with trying to get a Web application looking and behaving the same on all popular browsers.  So far this has not proven to be the case with what I have been doing.  I presenly do 95% of my development for the Notes client so I rarely have to worry about this issue.  But when I do Web client develoipment it always frustrates me the I can get my application toi look fine on one browser and then I can spend almost as much time again getting the application to look/behave the same on all Web browsers.  Thats one reason why I like Notes client development.  I am sure someone will have a comment about this, but I will guess that most solutions will involve doing something additional...  Which is fine, its nice to have a solution but it kills productivity when out of the box a control such as the view control can be so different in IE and FIrefox or even different versions of IE.  I can't wait until we get a new HTML standard and all browsers adhere to it (Microsoft are you listening?)

For now its back to building a few more XPages for the Notes client.  There is a lot I would like to say about XPages in the 8.5.1 context, but I can't.  Those of you in the beta program look out for a few episodes of  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly that I plan to post in the 8.5.1 beta forum in the next few days.  As soon as I can, I will share this with the yellowverse......