Yellow is the New Blog

A pre-Sphere tease from Nathan showed a glimpse of what he's been chipping away at for a while: an upcoming product from Lotus 911 called Carousel. It's an Eclipse component that, when included in a composite application, allows you to browse Notes/Domino data like you might browse your music library in iTunes. A few (quite a few, actually) lucky folks got to see this up close at our booth last week. The example included here (and in Nathan's tease) shows just one use for this: browsing an address book. But the demos that wowed booth visitors also included an augmented bookmarks database (allowing you to navigate your bookmarks via screenshots of each application's user interface) and - my favorite - integration of Carousel into a report database. In the latter example, Carousel is actually downloading a Google Charts URL, allowing report data to be browsed visually without actually storing the charts in the database itself. Pretty amazing stuff.

(cross-posted from TimTripcony.com)

Now that I've been back a couple days, I thought it'd be fun to look back on the highlights of my first Lotusphere.

• Meeting for the first time some of the coolest people in our community:
  Thomas Bahn, Bob Balaban, Chris Blatnick, Ed Brill, Bill Buchan, Chris Byrne, Mitch Cohen, Duffbert, Bruce Elgort, Adam Gartenberg, Andre Guirard, John Head, Mikkel Heisterberg, Theo Heselmans, Bernd Hort, Ben Langinrichs, Alan Lepofsky, Rob McDonagh, Paul Mooney, Rocky Oliver, Kevin Pettitt, Andrew Pollack, Phil Randolph, Jack Ratcliff, Mary Beth Raven, Julian Robichaux, Charles Robinson, Greyhawk, Rich Schwarz, Declan and Terri Sciolla-Lynch, Chris Toohey, jonvon, Martin Vereecken, Rich Waters, Stephan Wissel
  You know, just to name a few.
• Getting to spend some time catching up with some clients and former coworkers, one of whom I hadn't met before (long story).
• Attending some very innovative and enlightening sessions
• Being occasionally treated like a miniature rockstar at Kimono's, in the hallways, at our product showcase booth, and even a couple sessions
• Waking up on Tuesday morning unable to swallow... still haven't figured out why (allergic reaction, spraining my tongue during karaoke, who knows?). That might not seem like a highlight, but once I got over how weird it was, it was ridiculously funny.
• The response to all of the many announcements made by my employer before and during the conference (I'll be doing a series of posts this week outlining my personal take on the significance of each of these)
• Acting as courier for Bob Balaban (he gave me a rubber chicken to deliver to Nathan... no, I still don't know why)
• An 8 hour (no exaggeration) conversation with Chris Toohey (he now knows me better than most people I've known for years... sorry, Chris)
• Learning how to make my own Easy Cheese with nitrous oxide

And a couple of classic quotes:

• Bill - "These guys may be bleeding yellow, but I am sweating whiskey."
• Declan - "They're all after me lucky charms." (I was wearing a Lucky Charms hat at ESPN the night we arrived... he kept trying to steal it)
• Julian - "Ernie is the orange one, BIRT does the charts."
• My favorite: Mary Beth - "I was talking to your boss last night, and he told me, 'I have some really bright people... I'm just not so sure that they're sane'."

 
(cross-posted from TimTripcony.com)

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)