.Domino Framework

Let me first start by saying I am not a design partner and I do not have any inside contacts at IBM, so I have absolutely no inside information as to what IBM's plans are for the future of Notes programming.  But because I am not subject to any non-disclosure agreements I am free to speculate and say whatever I like. If I start to take a closer look at the tea-leaves now forming at the bottom of my yellow mug I wonder if there may be a pattern forming I had not seen before....

I have been taking a much closer look at X-Pages, the new design element  that is part of Notes 8.5.  This design element looks nothing like any other existing Notes design element.  And not just because of the new Eclipse editor.  I see a whole bunch of new controls that remind me more of my time as an ASP.Net developer than they do of Notes development.  I see the ability to bind these controls to data sources that include not just Notes documents and Notes views but also to SQL-databases and XML.  Again, this is not unlike ASP.Net development (except for the ability to natively link to Notes databases).  I also see that as I design an X-Page, it is building XML code which I can not only see but edit directly.... 

And when you look at the functionality of X-Pages, they seem to be able to do pretty much everything that many of the existing UI elements of Notes (Forms, Subforms, View, and Pages) can do.  Except that I can now combine them in ways that were never possible with these other design elements.  A number of other bloggers are starting to rave about the really cool stuff they can do using X-Pages.

I believe IBM are on record as saying they intend to make X-Pages available for the Notes client in a later release.  So what does that mean?  Unless X-Pages for Notes has a different set of controls that mirror more closely the existing set of controls I am probably going to be soon building new applications for the Notes client in a completely new way.  And thanks to X-pages these applications will look and behave the same on a Web client..  If X-Pages provides the functionality of other design elements such as forms why would I use both in an application?  Perhaps I am not supposed to?  Perhaps in a post Notes 8.5 world I am now supposed to do most of my UI design using ONLY these new design elements such as X-Pages?

Perhaps round-tripping of DXL is not an issue for IBM because they  see a future for us developers where we will be able to edit the XML from inside Notes.  Perthaps IBM are not making a major push to develop Eclipse editors for Forms, Pages, and Views because they see these design elements going the way of the Navigator (i.e. no new features added in future releases).  Perhaps there is no need to extend other Notes design elements such as views to support style sheets for the same reason.

It is not immediately clear If LotusScript will form a key component of the brave new world.  I am hoping so, because one of the reasons I believe the world has as many Notes applications as it does is that non-programmers (and many programmers) are often better able to teach themselves to program in BASIC-based programming languages much more so than they have ever been able to with Java, C, or JavaScript like languages...

The tea-leaves are still swirling around and so the future may show that I am completely wrong.  (But I do hope the dead fly floating at the top is Sharepoint!).  But just in case I am not completely wrong , I would suggest Notes Developers take a very close look at X-Pages - even if you do not do a lot of Web development.  X-Pages (and custom controls) just might provide an insight into how you will be building Notes client and dual client applications in the years to come.  Oh... and read the blogs of those that are design partners.  They may not be able to say a lot just yet... but look at what they don't say!