Now I know this is way early to be discussing, but I wanted to find out if anyone else feels the same way I do or should I just give up on Domino?
I was looking through the Domino 8 enhancements lists out there and the only thing that stands out at all is the ability to “call” other web services from Domino. Well that’s all well and fine, but that’s all us Web Developers on a Domino platform get?
I was kinda hoping for something like AJAX integration into views without the hefty coding required to make them AJAX capable. Or, let’s see, how about some built-in, powerful editor for text, including image handling, etc. You know, the kind of stuff many of us dream we would like to do over the web but which MS can’t bring themselves to impart. Or let’s see, how about a real JavaScript/DHTML based action bar for use over the web instead of the JAVA applet joke offered. Perhaps a JavaScript/DHTML based navigation for use with outlines. Maybe a table with tabs for the web. I’ve made them. Come on Lotus, you can’t do that one?
OK, so you’re going to say, what for? or go somewhere else for this, or look at the other features. What I’d love to see is IBM get real about Domino and stop thinking of it as a dead-end, but rather a great intermediate platform to Websphere. After all, I’m the only developer for a particular product in my global 400,000+ employee company. One developer is not something possible if my company ported to a MS platform or even Websphere for this product. I know because my company has all that other MS and websphere stuff for other products. They work great, but they have dozens and in one case hundreds of developers devoted to them.
Am I just up in the night, off my rocker, or worse? I’d like to see Domino become the intermediate platform it should be. Stop this migration BS and start taking advantage of a weakness in MS products. No, I don’t want ASP.net or FrontPage with Access or Sequel for a backend. To many products to fit together. I want a db that has power, like Domino, but without all the work this lowly single developer puts into it to make it that.
Any takers? Agreement or not, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This has already been beaten to death in the popular Domino blogs. No matter what IBM may say, Websphere is the strategic Web server and Domino is there to port Notes to the web and little else. There is no doubt that IIS, ColdFusion, PHP and the rest are far superior platforms for pure web applications. That said, IBM is making some improvements to the Domino server in Notes 8, so we aren’t being completely ignored.
well, I’ve got a feeling that Domino 8 really is Notes 8, meaning – it is foremost the client release. And the rest of steam goes in the backend work, sorta finally (hopefully) keeping Db2 integration promises (did not really check – just an assumption/hope). And I’d rather prefer to have a well-oiled backend that I can add any Web UI I fancy, than to have it other way round.
I’m sorta used to the awkward rendering so that I do not feel the pain anymore – I just switch on passthru HTML and type the stuff in. Honest, I also hate all these hoops you got to get through – modify/add properties in obscure places and JS and whatnot. Do what you may, 80-90% plain old HTML is the easiest way to make a usable Domino web app. Before it was explained with necessity to keep to compatible with 2nd then 3rd generation browsers and as far as the guys keep the backend quick and reliable so that we can add a decent web UI simpler than to any Java web application I have no big complaints.
Editor, yeah… but making it 100% perfik is not possible anyway; it’s basically undoable, hence no attempts do it halfway either. Meaning keeping it RT in Notes while editing both in Notes and web. I guess by using Ben’s tools you can come close to 90%, but still you are going to loose anything that does not translate to web.
Finally for Ajax and views I do not get your idea. What exactly you have to hack in order to use views with Ajax? ReadViewEntries (+ optionally RestrictToCategory)? Or?
Subject: Try DWT on openNTF for Domino Web Features
I feel your pain. I have a project on OpenNTF, Domino Web Tools (DWT), who’s goal over time is to addrees these issues. It uses Jack Slocum’s (http://www.jackslocum.com) awesome Javascript UI library and integrates it with Domino.
I thank all of you who posted. I guess I’m just tired of hard coding everything and thought Lotus would be nice and help by offering an optimized view template based in AJAX.
From what I’ve seen in the many posts and offerings there isn’t a functional AJAX/XML view that incorporates categories. Am I correct in this? If not, do you have any links?
I’ve worked and actually created an XML based view that is composed after the view is downloaded from Domino. It puts together the view into its categories so even though it takes about 8 seconds longer to load the whole view is loaded and you can twistie open any section to see other policies. I hope to make this AJAX enabled, but the biggest issue is its so hard to download just a particular part of a view, compose, then continue with the rest. Ideally it would be nice to download the headers, compose the view, continue with the next level of categories, etc, composing the view as you get more information.
As for an editor, here’s my holy grail of editing…like as if it will ever happen: MS allows a Word Session to be embedded in a browser page, with limited functionality of course. You can use it just like Word. When done the document is saved on the web page. When a user reads the document, it then loads a plug-in to display the Word document correctly. Not this HTML crap.
Now this is only a pipe dream. I have hope that with the advent of Word 2007 and XML based Word documents someone will come up with an XML Stylesheet that will take the Word XML document and be able to fake a decent editor. Hey, who knows.