Domino Designer "Lite"
Back in May I talked about the possibility of developing a Domino Designer "Lite" using DXL. Not long after and Steve Castledine gets in touch to say he's already started it. He's been a bit quiet since but recently he's launched a website to follow the progress of ProjectDX. Could be interesting. Very interesting.
Has this blog entry got anything to do with Steve treating me to a DVD of the funniest thing on TV at the moment? Maybe.
Of my site, Steve says:
The original think outside the box domino tips site - slowing turning into a general blog
Damn, somebody noticed... not sure I agree entirely though. The blogs are becoming the key to the site but I still see myself writing articles for as long as the site exists. Hopefully people won't forget there's a whole lot more behind codestore than me blogging on and on.
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I agree with Steve,
I think it would be nice if other people could contribute draft articles to your site. You would off course be end responsible and could rewrite articles so they stay funny to read and clear to interpret. For me the articles are the base of this site, for which I owe you many thanks.
People have always been welcome to submit draft articles and ideas for articles. As they say - I am all ears.
In fact there's a handful of articles written by other people on here already.... the only problem is that I am extremely fussy about what I will publish and what I won't. CONTENT IS KING!
Blog on, man, it's good for the soul.
"think outside the box"??? Dear me.
I am totally Domimo based, so I mainly come here for the Domino stuff. But I'm still interested in the other bits. So many other things are essential to decent Domino development. For a start, we should be laying out our markup with CSS and without layout tables, something blogged on here, and something codestore is a good example of. And JavaScript is hugely important to a lot of Domino developers.
There's enough good Domino stuff on here to please the Domino only brigade, but there's enough non-Domino stuff for me to recommend this site to web developers/designers in general.
I'm not sure Jake intended his articles to be "funny"!
Anyway, wasn't the motivational talk at the end of this week's Office absolutely brilliant! I had to sit there watching with a cushion over my face.
Codestore has been a blessing to me over the years so you can write your own description for my links page!
Okay:
"Jake Howlett - number one superstar!"
Done! - isnt the internet fantastic!
i'm going to tell my friends - i'm on codestore, i'm on codestore (to the voice of chandler in friends)
I watched that episode of The Office last night... I too had a cushion in close proximity. That show is brilliant.
Agree with the comments re Codestore, it's tops!
As for Domino Designer Lite... ooh yeah. With the demise of Designer for the Mac in ND6, there's been some discussion regarding a Java / DXL client for non-WIndoze machines over at the ND6 forum on LDD. That would be cool.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day IBM rolled the Designer client into the Websphere app dev studio environment though...
"Java / DXL client" thats one of my aims.
the eclipse project is supposed to be what future designer client will be within - which is where websphere studio already is
I missed your blog of May 16 on Designer Lite, but I've been thinking about this too, on account of IBM giving us Mac developers the cold shoulder. I don't really want to completely abandon Domino and all the time I've spent on it (even though PHP for instance is very appealing in certain ways, as is Lasso with its SQL abstraction) but I don't want to be forced to leave my preferred OS either. (Sure I have a desktop PC for times when I need it, but my PowerBook goes with me almost everywhere, and I use it for almost everything. To be chained to a desktop running an OS I don't prefer would not be fun.)
Since I don't know C/C++ or Java, my plan was to either
1)use REALbasic to build a cross-platform Design Client, or
2) build widgets for Dreamweaver, that would allow me to build Domino forms (at least, if not views and agents) completely in DW.
Possibly a combination of these would be desireable. Building forms in DW makes the most sense, since (as far as I understand) its extensibility would allow for any new element to be added and represented by a graphic widget. (Please correct me if anyone knows better, or confirm if anyone has actually done this.)
But agents don't seem to make sense in DW--well, I take that back--some agents would make sense: those which mostly just print HTML. So if you could have an html page in DW with lotusscript code interspersed throughout, it would mean you suddenly had something (kind of) like PHP built into domino. And of course you'd have to build *either* a form *or* an agent. You couldn't mix form widgets and lotusscript code.
And views might make sense in DW too, since so often we want to put html in the views and it's a big pain in the rear with designer to cut html from dw and paste it into extra columns between the real ones, etc.
This seems like the easiest and most flexible approach, provided there's a way to move the DXL to the server and make it a part of the design of the database. Sure we've finally got webDAV with 6, but I doubt they had the foresight to let you put DXL into a db with webDAV and have it become part of the db. (Anyone know for sure?) I assume you'd probably have to bring the whole db down to the client as DXL, and then add your forms and views and agents, and then put it back on the server. (?) So this might require an additional client application, which could be written for both Mac and Windows in REALbasic. Since it's a compiled object-oriented basic, it should be easy for all LotusScriptors to learn, and since the REALbasic development tool is now cross-platform just like the apps built with it, Windows developers can take part in the project.
I took a look at Steve's ProjectDX, and I must admit I don't entirely understand it. It seems to have a very broad scope that goes beyond just building a better (not necessarily 'lite') Design Client that runs across platforms. So I don't think we'd be duplicating efforts, and if our aims are similar, it could be made complementary to his work. (Steve maybe you could respond to this? Thanks.)
Developers who work on unix/linux are either not working in Domino, or are dual-booting, or are using WINE (WINdows Emulator). They'd be able to continue that approach, or cross over to Mac OS X (which is unix!). So this plan would really allow anyone on any of the three biggest platforms to continue developing for Domino, and more importantly would finally give a good approach to integration between Domino and Dreamweaver.
(if anyone wants to send me e-mail, put 'codestore' in the subject line so it doesn't get put in my junk mail folder.)
I really hope "lite" comes in much "liter" than the websphere application designer!! This fat momma clocks in over 400MB! (Not to mention the other bloated software from that family). One of the goals I've managed to achieve with Puakma is the ability to update a web app from anywhere using only the web browser. Best part - if you don't like it, you can change it cause all the source code is in there. From my experience it is impossible to come up with a single designer client that that ALL developers like.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing what shape Steve's projectDX development takes.
Brendon
http://www.puakma.net
I looked at Project DX, too. Very confusing. I applaud his efforts, and its obvious he has real talent - but what's the vision? The words on the site don't quite match up to the examples.
The demo is quite buggy, and none of the stuff seems to have a real focus. Mostly its just a lot of half-baked ideas that are very cool to explore - but not anything someone is going to pay for. If it weren't for reading that bit about licensing costs I would have thought much more of it.
Thanks for the comments David - I'm always open to suggestions/questioning - else what would be the point?
Getting a message across via text/web site is more difficult than I ever imagined - not really my skill set.
If you could let me know the bugs - not aware of any - there was a servlet timeout issue getting data from notes - but they resolved that yesterday.
Steve