scott cochrane :: Lotus Developer 2006 (Vienna). .. some sound bites

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Just coming back from a great weekend at Vienna. A little knackered .. and I'm not sure if thats due to the Notes/Domino overload (does that really exist?) or the beer that Bill Buchan was plying us with

- either way it was good few days.

There was loads of technical content, great presenters and this year the Developer and Admin tracks all ran together, and developers/admins were free to attend any sessions .. its amazing there were no fights!

If you want to see the content then just check out the website, although I still read some of the descriptions thinking it sound

I thought I'd just collect together, in no particular order, some of the points that caught my attention over the last few days (and it will help me remember it all) ..

On Sales ...

Apparently in the last 2 years Notes/Domino has increased it presence in the Fortune 100 from 55 to 78 .... why don't we hear more about these things!
Double digit growth for last 4 years (I think that was right) - point was that the sales position was very good.

On Web development ...

If you want to do quite serious web development the Domino translation engine just isn't up and you really have to go back to scratch (that wasn't a big surprise).
For cool UI stuff check out the javascript frameworks like Prototype, Rico and the Yahoo UI.
The idea of one form 2 clients (ie Notes and web) is a myth - if you need a web form - create a second form explicitly for the web.
?OpenView or similar commands on a url don't have to be used - as long as the design elements in your app all have unique names - cool.
If you have a lot of javascript use a compression tool that will remove all your nice formatting - but could easily reduce the size of a file by a third!

On Web services ...

You can send an object over http from a Domino 7 web service - now I knew you could serialize and object and send it over http, but if you code it right Domino does the work for you - nice.
Rocky Oliver demonstrated how you could generate the code from the MS Office Web Services toolkit - it still uses COM but does a lot of the work for you. Check out www.lotusgeek.com for a posting.

On Notes/Domino 8 / DB2 backend...

You will be able to consume web services
It looks very smart .. the productivity tools were certainly getting a lot of use by the IBM crowd, in particular, when running all the presentations that they were doing.
IBM have apparently decided that the productivity tools are so good for most people (I read this as well over 50%) that they are not going to renew the MS Office license.
You won't be able to save direct from a productivity tool direct to a Notes document - initially, but it sounds like this is in the plans.
The DB2 backend of course isn't available for general use - although you could implement it. Overall view was that it isn't ready for production use - but it will be for version 8 (heres hoping).

On Java and LotusScript ...

At least a couple of speakers said this (and I am paraphrasing): "forget what IBM are telling you, with Notes moving towards Eclipse Java is going to be big .. "
Apparently there are about 1/2 a million LotusScript developers out there! Wow - I'm going to have to find out how that compares with other

On XML ...

XML is a great way to exchange data with other systems and domino can support it via pages,forms, views and agents
XML is preferred for small amounts of data often - but an example of loading 50,000 records from Domino to some other system was given and apparently it was pretty quick - about a minute to process. I'm going to look into that.

On Vendor products ...

The lastest version of Teamstudios Build Manager is 3.0.22 - minor changes I think but most notably there is an option when enabling agents to ensure that the agent on the database is refreshed, even if the design hasn't changed - pretty cool, and its amazing because this very thing caught me out a couple of weeks ago. There is also a new role to change the UI for certain users such that they only see the promotion paths (not all the stuff that goes with them
Integra for Notes has come a long way since I last looked at it (which admittedly was a couple of years ago) - if you have issues reporting on Notes data, well worth a look. I'll be looking at it again.
Domain Patrol - one for you admins, a neat little product that extends the usefulness of the catalog well beyond the out of the box capability - they nicely describe it as "the catalog.nsf on steroids". And best of all you can download it as freeware - the restriction being that you can't schedule it on a server - you have to run it client side.

On Testing and development..

There is a HttpUnit testing framework out there - and it will test your Domino apps. Junit testing also gives you ano
There isn't a good way to automatically unit test Notes client apps - best you can do is create test harnesses for your LotusScript classes/functions.
Design patterns work well in the Domino/java world - not so well with LotusScript and since the Notes client breaks so much of the O-O model you'd be hard pressed to apply a design pattern to the Notes UI.
Bill Buchans message on using the Notes C API (either via creating your own LSX or calling the C API from LotusScript) was quite simply .. don't do it. Then I think he reconsidered and said 'really don't do it' . It was actually a very good intro to using the C API and some of the pitfalls - but you wouldn't want to do it unless you really had to. And I don't get the impression that developers have a great need for this - the opportunities it provides are more appropriate for administrators - but that said its worth being aware of it.

And finally ...on the UI ..

check out the principle of low fidelity prototyping - its basically creating your UI on paper and using an interface first design methodology (that sentence probably doesn't do it justice :-0 ). Anyway, check it out - Chris Blatniks site interfacematters.com is the place to start.

A big thanks to all the presenters - I don't know how any one could go away disappointed with the content... I just need to decide what to follow-up on first.

Oh and I final got round to doing on of those pesky admin exams (Notes6 fundamentals) and passed

... and I'm sure the admin guys keep telling its hard ... hoo hum..