We are so not an afterthought
I have seen the future... and it is
awesome.
I've never been more thrilled to be
proven
wrong. Based on everything that
I witnessed over the past week (enumerated in exquisite detail elsewhere),
I feel confident in asserting that, if Domino developers were ever an afterthought,
we're not any more.
Several folks I discussed this with
over the last couple days have complained that it's still not enough; "too
little, too late", and so on. I can respect that. They certainly made
some valid points during those dicussions. But my primary concerns have
been definitively addressed:
- I saw several ways in which IBM will
be shielding the average developer from some behind-the-scenes complexity.
For example, the fancy new "xPage" elements coming in 8.5 include
the ability to make various controls Ajaxy with a simple checkbox... and
specify what data will be retrieved via Formula. Not the relative path
of an agent or servlet, not a JSON object... friggin' Formula, man. Doesn't
get much easier than that. Widgets and Live Text are going to give us some
additional capabilities that will likely be a bit trickier to implement,
but not to the point that they won't be worth digging into. I think my
only criticism is that typeahead for custom LotusScript classes is still
"on the radar"... but, hey, I'll live. We're headed in the right
direction, and I trust the momentum will continue to take us in that direction
in the long term.
- Domino is finally going to be a first
class web server again. But they're not locking us into Dojo. They'd already
promised they wouldn't, but hadn't gone into much (yeah, okay, any) detail
about how exactly we could leverage the same model they're taking with
Dojo in alternate frameworks. As it turns out, they did exactly what I'd
suggested, just at a deeper layer, which - for performance reasons alone
(among others) - will probably be far better than the specific model I'd
espoused. Granted, it's going to require a larger investment of time, energy
and research (hint, start reading up now on JavaServer
Faces) to cater to an alternate
framework. Oh, and you'll have to choose one per server rather than per
application (Bob, smack me if that assumption is incorrect). So while this
type of customization will probably be best suited for OpenNTF / BP's,
theoretically any customer will be able to modify the HTML rendering engine...
or even swap it out with an entire replacement engine.
So the end result is that IBM has simply
broadened the spectrum of what can be done within the platform. As always,
the old stuff remains intact. Those who choose to develop the way that
they always have are perfectly free to do so, and will be getting assistance
by the end of the year in applying what they already know to deliver functionality
and interfaces that will wow their users and/or customers. Those of us
that are ready and willing to evolve are simply being given an even more
ginormous space within which to grow. Lotus
911 has some ideas on how to assist
that evolution... those of you who were at the conference may have gotten
to see a bit of that up close, but I'll provide additional detail for broader
consumption post haste.
(cross-posted from TimTripcony.com)
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We are so not an afterthought
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