Leadership By Numbers :: Please Add RIA to Domino Development

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Stephan Wissel has asked for comments on his forthcoming commentary on what it takes to be a Domino Developer. Because Stephan is a development wizard, I will be reading his every word.

But, I'm also going to make a plea, in hopes that with the new 8.5 Eclipse Domino Designer we can extend the relevance of the Lotus platform.

The corporate IT world is facing the integration of external, hosted social systems. I don't think enterprise computing will vanish (ala Nicholas Carr) because of these trends, anymore than outsourcing wiped clean entire departments. I can agree, though, that the deck is going to be shuffled and it's going to be important to hold some open-source cards in your hand.

SDTimes reports on a study by Evans Data, which identifies that "second generation" corporate programmers are doing more than .NET and J2EE.

Close to 40% of developers creating collaborative programs are writing such Web 2.0 applications for a corporate enterprise, said John Andrews, president and chief executive of Evans Data, at a developer relations conference hosted by the research firm Monday.

These developers are also widely embracing open-source platforms, Andrews noted, as 70% of developers surveyed use scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby.

I have my fingers crossed that it'll be possible in 8.5 to build out some very unique solutions: Rich Internet Applications.

Comments

3 - I think I can share without violating my NDA: the UI toolkit for Domino 8.5 will be Dojo with custom Widgets. There you get very close to JavaScript based RIA. Also the new UI capabilities are structured declarative: you define something and the runtime renders it into the execution platform (think JFace). While the first incarnation will use Dojo, the architecture is build to allow other rendering engines like Flex or AIR(I doubt however we would support silverlight). Of course kewl infrastructure needs its time.
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stw
P.S.: This is in no way an official IBM statement.

Posted by Stephan H. Wissel At 07:18:43 PM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |

2 - Thanks, Ed. Yup, it'll be time to roll up the sleeve and do some seriously cool programming. But, I think the learning curve is going to be steep for both sides: oldtimers having to deal with everything from mashups to SOA and the newbies trying to understand the non-relational structure and security of Domino.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 05:52:53 AM On 05/04/2008 | - Website - |

1 - I agree that RIA is the way to go. Adobe Flex and AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and Open Source projects like Curve and OpenLaszlo all produce web applications that look and feel like desktop apps. The ajax tools that are on the way for a future version of Domino are already behind the curve for web interfaces. They are essentially bringing Domino up to where it should have been two years ago while the competition pulls further ahead.

Posted by Ed Maloney At 12:55:19 AM On 05/04/2008 | - Website - |