Critical Masses Technology, Inc.

Reading all the press and Yellowverse comments about release 8.5.1 of Notes/Domino is illuminating. As a developer, yes, 8.5.1 is the answer to a great many prayers. In particular, XPages support is being fleshed out nicely, with an upgrade to the native Dojo JavaScript libraries and enhanced documentation. A definitive XSP tag dictionary would be nice, though. I still eagerly await a proper XPages debugger, which, I am happy to report, seems to be in the works. A complete rewrite of the creaky LotusScript editor based upon the modern goodness that is Eclipse is a welcome addition.

You know I’m leading up to something, though. As much as I love Notes, the only question that Notes answers completely and satisfactorily (IMHO) is “If I had to pick one and only one program to run my entire business, which one would it be?” In that case, the answer is overwhelmingly Notes. Nothing else even comes close. Of course, no one asks that question because no sane person has to make that choice! In which case, what is it that Notes is lacking that the competition isn’t? Well, for email the answer seems to be mostly the synergy that Windows shops get with the complete MS and third-party stack that –truth be told- does exist in Notes, but not to the seamless or widespread effect that it does with the Exchange/Outlook combination. For collaboration, MOSS seems to have a unified set of API’s to program to that is bifurcated (trifurcated?) by Notes/Quickr and Sametime, in addition to the massive third party and developer support. Of course, that last point is a chicken and egg problem, but it’s still worth noting. Moneyquote: More evidence that Sharepoint is the new VB: SP 2009 conference sold out at 7000 attendees. Wow. http://bit.ly/KzGuj (@john_lam) Let’s face it, Notes will never be that popular, but what really sucks is when what is commonly considered your biggest competitor is.

I’m not the magic bullet type and I don’t pretend to know what the answers for Lotus or us loyal third-party developers are other than to continue churn out quality product. A thought: Could releasing the XPages engine into the wild as a free standalone server seed mindshare? There are already several excellent free and/or open source JSP servers out there, why not get some folks hooked on our flavor?

Sidebar: Multiple choice question:

Further installments on my Dojo DND tutorial series have been delayed by:

a) circumstances  beyond my control?
b) a desire to see what release 8.5.1 brings to the XPages/Dojo table?
c) a dearth of sufficient choices in persisting a link between a table row and a back end Notes object using native XPages controls?
d) all of the above.

The correct answer is d.