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Image:First impressions on Notes/Domino 8.5 Beta 2 (General + XPages dissection)
 
Ok, last week was a "release-week" with new stuff coming out all together.

After upgrading my "work" client to Notes 8.0.2 I was happy, faster and better. On the way to an even better 8.5 client.

Then the other news, Notes/Domino 8.5 beta 2 out just a few days later.

So I upgraded my "playground environment" (including the www.vistalli.it server) to ND 8.5 Beta 2 (smooth, 35 minutes, including the time for download)


Here's what I found out (focus on the client):

Notes Client
Fast, fast, fast !!!! Like in 8.0.2 the experience is once again better (even if Notes 8.5 uses the next-generation Expeditor runtime).
One welcome feature is the addition of explanation to the startup gauge-bar. Knowing what's going on is psychologically better than just having the silent gauge bar. This is good even for non-technical users. It helps diagnosing problems, it provides better feedback.
A lot of icons also improved, I mean you get better understanding of what tose are intended to do. (Symphony document icons, Quickr icons and so on)

Notes Designer
Here we come, I think the biggest changes are in designer. Finally it's fast, stable (almost), and cleaned up. The new organization of design elements is well tought and you get used to it in a second.

Composite applications
Since Notes 8.0 we got this new greate feature. You can today assemple apps by designing a "perspective" and gluing components together. Notes 8.5 gets updates in this area, thanks to the new Expeditor.
You can now:

  • Add components to the left and right sidebar. This means you get the possibility to have Side-view helpers (can be activated when your app is active or when it's just open)
  • New advanced capabilities for wiring between the Notes client (NSF and Java components) and the web. Take a look at Bob Balfe's demo about what's coming.

XPages
XPages is the single most revolutionary feature that we'll get in ND 8.5. As reported it's going to be a Web / Server oriented feature at first (we only get the value on the server-side).

Apart from what you already know from the great articles published on the blog-sphere I looked into the XSP component to find out what's going on behind the scenes.
As you may know XPages are the inheritance of Lotus Workplace/Component Designer a piece of technology that was born to bring to portal RAD capabilities.

Today we're allowed only to use domino data sources (Views and Documents) but I think more will come over time.

Looking into the product directory /xsp/nsf I found a couple of interesting things:

lwpd.commons.jdbc.jar
lwpd.runtime.rest.jar
lwpd.runtime.webservices.jar

I'm not sure this means we'll get support for Rest/Web services or JDBC datasources soon but for sure those may come to expand the capabilities of the new XPages world.

XPages preview in the client (what it means)
A new GREAT feature that's included in the new Notes designer client. Historically we've been able to develop and test web application locally using the designer client.
Historically when previewing on local the HTTP task was started in the client and we could test the application.
Now we get the same support since the XSP engine (the component that enables XPages on the server) has been incorporated into designer.

As a side note this could mean that even if not planned for ND 8.5 GA the support for XPages in the client could be not so far away. Of course it would be an embedded browser running the application from the local XPages (JSF/Servlet) engine in the client.
The backing technology (thats JSF) allows for multiple renderer that abstract UI from application functionality. This means that Ideally that IBM could create a "real client" ui to transform XPages into SWT/Java/Native UI elements for an even better experience (I don't trust Browsers + Ajax 100%).

Whatever will happen the preview capability is welcome and will foster the adoption of the new paradigm. Great work guys.

Domino AJAX Proxy

The domino server (and the designer client) adds a new feature that's an Ajax Proxy to be used for your ajax needs. The proxy is part of the XSP extantions in the domino HTTP server.
You can find more details about it in the /xsp/proxy and configure it with the proxy-config.properties.
Configuration is needed to control and maintain security of your environment.

For instance the AJAX Proxy will be needed to support the Quickr integration for DWA that allows you to save/retrieve documents from you quickr system directly into DWA e-mails

DWA/iNotes upgrades

DWA has once again improved. It's fast, good looking and feature rich. The IPHONE / Ultra-lite webmail is welcome but to me other things are more imporant.

The possibility to use Quickr with DWA direclty from a browser is going to be a winner at many customers. Support for more and more integrations (based on the ajax proxy) is going to help once again.

Finally it seems to me that differently from the old iNotes the new DWA could be a lot more open and I could see an SDK coming to allow for integration of new featueres into the DWA Client that seems to become more than a Mail client. It's starting to look a lot like a full blown client on the web (imagine openin your webapp into a DWA tab like you do for e-mails).

It's not clear what we get... but I hope something like this can happen / be announced in time for ND 8.5 release.



Comments (1)
Daniele Vistalli August 31st, 2008 13:10:41

 Comments
1) I have often thought that IBM might leverage DWA...
Harris Huckabee 09/09/2008 18:17:33

as a way to take an interface that is familiar to users and gradually change it over time to become "more than mail"... a "user-defined portal" type of web 2.0 application. However, as I do DWA customization, I can say that the DWA javascript code has a very non-intuitive structure, though it became a little better with 8.0.1. If IBM will continue to make the code more maintainable/customizable, it could be a great thing for developers and users alike.

Thanks for your summary, Daniele... it was thought-provoking.

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