Beyond The Yellow Bubble

The Good: Themes  - When I first started doing Notes development Forms were the only option for editing data and there were only 8 background colors available  There were some Notes developers who felt they needed to use all 8 background colors if they possibly could in their application.  Slowly the choices for styling a Notes application have improved.  But we have never reached the point where CSS and themes are fully supported.  Even now forms provide only a limited support for CSS on the Notes client and views none at all.  For Web applications a lot of pass-thru HTML is often required.  With 8.5.0 we now have a CSS editor that acts a whole lot better than a text editor.  And with XPages we have a design element that fully supports both CSS and themes. 

For the past few years I have moved away from the idea of having each and every application with its own look and feel.  To do so makes each application a little more difficult to learn.  When applications are combined in a composite application (something I believe we will see a LOT more of) they can look terrible when consistent colors have not been used.  I often felt it was better to have a user select the color/theme they prefer than have a developer or key user select their preferred color scheme.  I like that we now have a design element where we can empower users to make these choices.  It allows a Notes developer to provide a personal touch to their applications.

The Bad: Importing Forms - The first time you see someone from IBM demo how easy it is to import a form into a new XPage you go "wow... that's pretty cool, it even finds creates the labels  and all!!!".  The first time.   After that you start to notice that the labels are derived from the field names themselves and not screen scraped off the form.  You also find that not a lot is brought over for each field.  Radio buttons are text, default values don't exist, field validation is not there, and keyword lists are not brought across, no tab orders, and hidden fields are not hidden.  So while it is a start, be prepared for a lot of work migrating an existing form to an XPage.  In the future I expect someone with strong XSLT skills may find a way to translate DXL into the appropriate XP tags (or at least go a lot further than IBM did).

Random Thoughts:  I believe one of the biggest opportunities for software development in general and Notes development in particular is Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).  Now that Notes has Web Service Providers, Web Service Consumers, and Composite Applications it is becoming possible to integrate Notes and non-Notes applications in a way that the underlying platform becomes less relevant.  This should be a boom for Notes development as Notes can be applied for all those components where its RAD style provides cost effective solutions and Java/.Net can be used for heavy lift applications.  With SOA a homogeneous environment is no longer needed.  So just as SOA potentially provides a way for us to integrate Notes and non-Notes applications it seems SOA may also represent a way in which we can seek to integrate XPage and non-XPage applications.  Got lots of code built in LotusScript, well what if we made the XPage consume that code via Web services.  Got an application that has a lot of cool stuff developed with forms, views etc and need to do an enhancement that only an XPage will do, then perhaps a Composite Application can be used to tie the components together.  This is the approach I am now taking with my new xDomino Project.

Note: Observant people may have noticed I skipped a number in this series.  I now have so many thoughts about XPages for Notes I have started to blog into the 8.5.1 beta forum.  As soon as this information goes public I will publish on this blog site....