JMP206 - Introducing IBM Lotus Domino Designer 8.5 by speakers Ishfak Bhagat and Dan O'Connor.

While we were waiting for the session to start, I met a nice woman named Cassandra next to me who made a great point that ripping the session pages out of your conference guide makes it nice and light and easy to take home.  (I need to keep the session pages as that's how I look up what presentations on PDFs I need! - sigh. Thanks Cassandra! Remember to introduce yourself to the person next to you - I've just made a friend.)

We start with a full room, and Eclipse basics!
Eclipse brings a modern IDE to developers. This means that other vendor tools can now be plugged into Designer easily.

NSF files are presented to Eclipse as an Eclipse Project, called the Eclipse Virtual File System (VFS).

At first glance we will notice that there are no more bookmarks! Everything should look familiar, but better. There are also no more infoboxes - they are property panels instead.

Eclipse uses something called "Perspectives", which is a grouping of toolbars and menu items. Therefore, Domino Designer has its own Eclipse Designer Perspective.

"Working Sets" allows you to filter applications you are working on. Remember the "recent databases" view on the left? Imagine you can pick and choose different sets of databases by group. If you have a special project that involves updating a group of databases, you can create a working set to only show those.

You can switch Working Sets anytime.

(Cassandra and I both agree to shimmy our chairs about a foot to the right into the aisle - we are both short and can't see a thing! - yet another reason to make friends with the person next to you.)

You can do all your editing in Eclipse, whether its HTML, CSS, XML, etc. The javascript editor is right underneath the current LS editor (a new LS Editor is coming in 8.5.1).  The JS editor has inline error control - nice.

HTML editing is done by creating a new file in Eclipse. It then gets saved as an HTML file in your application (database) in the "Files" section of your project.

I have to say right now everything looks more intuitive than it seems at first glance, although I'm REALLY glad I went to this Jumpstart.

You can now right-click two forms and compare design changes. It uses native Eclipse DXL functionality to evaluate all the code.

You can set application-wide themes using CSS.

We now go into a long monologue about XPages, which is tough as I currently have no context to go along with (no screenshots, demo's, etc.). I'm hoping a demo is to follow. The gist - through custom controls, you can create resusable components that do not require any Java knowledge.

Woot - demo time.

Each control is pointed to a particular data source. Any control can have a seperate data binding panel, in which the data source is selected. Everything seems to be property-driven, which is nice.

Overall so far, we are halfway through the session and I feel confident that I could sit down and use the new features of Designer and not feel overwhelmed, which is exactly what I was hoping to get out of the session.

The focus here there and everywhere really seems to be on XPages, so I'm having  a hard time wondering if creating a regular form works the same way.

We are talking about Toolbars now - Toolbars are a mix of standard Eclipse and Designer. Existing toolbars you've created will work in the Designer editor.

A strong vibe I'm getting is that I really, really need to know DXL/XML. Many Eclipse views and features seem to pull data in as raw DXL. I am seeing a lot of focus on XPages everywhere. Each segment seems to end with "Well, that's it on XPages", and the next segment always ends up back there.

However - XPages in the rich client is coming next. The speaker already has demos of this to show us in the labs. It's apparent there are other client junkies like me as there were some "walkouts" when the XPages talk started.

Oh, he did tell us again - we can soon expect an "Eclipsified" Lotusscript Editor coming soon.

- Jess

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