Jan Schulz

That's at least the impression I get after reading all the blog postings about xPages and the new 8.5.1 client. Forms, Pages and so on are out and the future UI will be done in xPages for both the notes client and web.

(Disclaimer: I've not yet seen the new DDE and xPages as a design element and also not the 8.5.1 closed beta with client side xPages)

I'm in two minds about this development. My only impression of xPages are the webpages, which came to life in the last month and I find them horrible from a technical viewpoint: no valid HTML, no accessible build in, wastefull source code, JavaScript is needed to get basic functionality. Bah! Thats not one step backward in web development, but several miles in my opinion. Something like replacing something horrible with something new and then only getting half the way and getting the buggy alpha version (=80s html coding with tables and without css) instead of something state of the art (clean css layouts, progressive enhancement, accessible).

On the other hand I'm currently trying to build a translated web 2.0 UI for the notes client and that's a pain. You need one hack after another to get the experience right, some things simple don't work, (re)styling the whole UI is tedious at best (even with CSS or tools like NotesHound or Ytrias suite) and you get a lot of "strange" behaviour (or bugs? I'm too tired to reproduce and report all the small things along I discovered while playing with @Elements in HideWhen and uidoc.refresh from "on event postsave" of another document. First would be that the debugger only "sees" one opened doc...). Even translated GUIs are a big hack and not every element is translatable (the "subaction"-action in the action bar always shows the name, not the label -> looks like a bug; View lables not at all, buttons only by using Client JavaScript).

So getting a new, clean and probably proven development model and interface (I guess, that a browser is used to display client side xPages and not another GUI interpreter) is a good thing, even if I would need to start from zero again with Notes development.

Another good thing is, that this way a "hip" technology gets into notes development: web-development with html, css and javascript. This will lower the entry barrier for new developers coming from that direction, which is especially important for my (student) organisation with new people every two years: now someone with some web developer experience can hack together some new feature without getting to learn a complete new technology (and note sis new, because there is no "personal" use for notes). With some luck they wouldn't even need to code twice, as xPages should work the same in the web and in the client.

And it still go all the great technologies like security build in, replication, ... just with new, better and fresh UIs, which do not look like last century anymore. Finally a wiki in the client! Yay! So one reason less to complain about Notes :-)

So I think, that xPages and SSJS will replace LS and all the "old style" design elements or at least put them into deep maintainance mode. Which is itself the second negative point: I don't believe that all the bugs and shortcomings in the old style design elements will be fixed and so the only way going forward is redoing it all in xPages.

But overall I thing that xPages are great news for lotus notes: it gets rids of the weak point while keeping the strong points.

If the resulting html-code wouldn't be so "old style". Please, IBM, fix that! And you, dear reader, go vote on that :-)