On the web and weblogs you read a lot about the upcoming release of Notes/Domino 8. But for me the focus lies way too much on the client. For me as a developer, I cannot recall actually when I created my last Notes client focussed database. It’s all web now.

And that’s where for me a lot of improvements are needed. Some things I wish for:

  1. a user session object I can extend
  2. a good java editor (given the fact that Notes 8 will be eclipsed based… can I assume that the designer also will be eclipse based?)
  3. native java classes instead of a ‘thin’ layer on top of the C api. I’m getting a bit tired of recycling my objects all the time.
  4. complete control of the HTML rendered (have a look at how Visual Studio allows me to switch between layout and html code)
  5. a debugger that allows me to specify WHICH database I would like to debug instead of debugging -all- databases. Sigh… that’s so annoying.
  6. web debugging! (again, have a look at Visual Studio which allows me to debug a website running server code while debugging on the client)
  7. a build in style sheet editor

And two whishes which probably will never happen:

  1. a change in the ‘use model’ of Domino. I mean with this currently you ‘only’ have WebQueryOpen and WebQuerySave. That’s where all the advanced logic should be: before you open the form or after you submit the form. Of course you can make use of ajax or execute agents on the fly using ‘ToolsRunMacro’ but that still feels ‘clumsy’ to me. Having developed for Domino for over 10 years now I still don’t like that model completely. It feels ‘restricted’. When I became familiar with ASP.NET it felt so much more ‘mature’ given the fact that it allows me to run back-end code on say a change in the drop-down field. It would mean that a form should have a ‘back-end’ code part. A bit like what you can do in the client today using LotusScript on fields events etc. ASP.NET allows you to do that on the web. Can we please have that in Domino too?
  2. and my ultimate wish: native support for .NET based languages. DB2 does support .NET… but Domino? naah, that will probably never happen… (and I’m not talking about using the COM classes, I dreaming about coding agents directly in C#… :-) )

Anything I missed you think is vital?

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