ESCAPE VELOCITY :: App Dev Keynote at Lotusphere

Seeing some cool stuff here from Maureen Leland about Domino Designer in Eclipse, followed by some nifty, truly easy-to-use Mashup capabilities. BIG CHEERS for the Mashup UI using giant click targets. BIG JEERS for calling anything that a user looks at an "Event."

Then I had to sit through 20 minutes on Websphere Portal 6.1. Now I'm looking at Websphere Portlet Factory.

Portlet factory: "We include a test server in the design environment so you can get up and running." -- Does that mean I don't need a Websphere Portal AT ALL to get this installed on my machine?

Now we see Portlet Factory's Dojo implementation. *groan* I'm supposed to be excited that I can set a grid to highlight on hover. Let me introduce the Portlet Factory team to Ext.ND -- which left you guys behind on this stuff 2 years ago.

Now we're seeing details on the LiveText/Composite App model for Notes 8.0.1. I've seen some of this stuff before and it's simply stunning. I'm honestly a bit upset that it's not getting more play here at 'sphere. The first release of this stuff is going to be a bit chaotic, but when they start giving developers abstraction controls around it, it's going to blow everyone out of the water. I'll try to get some examples of what it will enable in the coming days.

Also -- a cool thing: a toolbar icon (please give me another vector on that guys, I hate toolbars) that puts any current view into the sidebar. A funny effect of that is that the demonstration view they're using looks absolutely atrocious. I can't even count the number of UI guideline violations it's committing. So when you add it to the sidebar, and you start cramming it in to 25% of the former width, it truly gouges your eyes. Notes developers are REALLY going to need to step up their UI game to deal with the fact they can't even know that the view is being rendered any wider than 200 pixels.

Ah, so we're finally seeing how these various elements automagically define their WSDL specs. Which suggests that we're getting away from the Property Broker editor. THANK ~~GOD~~ IBM.

Comments

1 - Based on my experience with IBM eclipse-based products (I'm an IBMer), yes, that should mean that an embedded test runtime of Portal is in the IDE, the same way RAD (Rational Application Developer) includes test runtimes of various WAS versions, and WID (WebSphere Integration Developer) includes a test runtime of Portal Server.

It also means by rebound, though, that your dev machine will have to be loaded with RAM to be productive. Typically, we recommended 2Gb RAM for RAD development. And say that more is better...

Posted by Jean-Francois Arseneault At 11:35:38 AM On 01/24/2008 | - Website - |