Skip to main content

The Ugly Duckling

It has been a long time since I blogged. It has been a very busy late spring and summer. We are finally completing our IBF Portal module that handles all interactive between a user and the Integrated Business Framework components on the Domino server. For years now Notes has been the "Ugly Duckling" of the IT world and both pro and con Notes users have complained about it. The new Notes 8 interface will bring a great new look and feel that has been lacking for years in the Notes interface. However, the standard version of Notes 8 also has a much heavier hardware requirement especially with Vista. For companies that have older hardware or will not be able to have the necessary hardware soon, they can upgrade to Notes 8 basic but it still has the same interface that everyone complains about.

In the last beta, IBM has done a great job in improving the loading speed of the client but not as fast as the Notes basic client. But the Basic client has an advantage, speed. Since it is smaller and lighter than standard client, it runs faster and load faster even if you have older hardware. Given the size of the standard client it will be interesting how fast the Nomad 8 client will be. USB 2.0 is only so fast. Yes, it is true that the Notes 8 basic client can not provide you access to some of the new capabilities. This is a trade off that most organizations will need to assess in the future.

But not to despair, for current users using 6.5 and 7 and future users of Notes 8 basic, Notes does not need to be a "Ugly Duckling." It takes thinking out of the box and the understanding what Notes can truly do. When developing the IBF Portal, we needed to have an interface that worked not only for large Notes organizations but for small organizations whom might never have used Notes, but was familiar with Microsoft. We wanted an interface that could work with our IBF applications and with applications developed by other organizations. The interface needed to work in a hosted environment and on a local server environment. It had to run well not only in a LAN environment but also on the Web. And here is the results. I will talk more about the techniques and tricks over the course of the next few months.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The iPhora Journey - Part 8 - Flow-based Programming

After my last post in this series -- way back in September 2022, several things happened that prevented any further installments. First came CollabSphere 2022 and then CollabSphere 2023, and organizing international conferences can easily consume all of one's spare time. Throughout this same time period, our product development efforts continued at full speed and are just now coming to fruition, which means it is finally time to continue our blog series. So let's get started... As developers, most of us create applications through the conscious act of programming, either procedural, as many of us old-timers grew up with, or object-oriented, which we grudgingly had to admit was better. This is true whether we are using Java, LotusScript, C++ or Rust on Domino. (By the way, does anyone remember Pascal? When I was in school, I remember being told it was the language of the future, but for some reason it didn't seem to survive past the MTV era).  But in the last decade, there a

Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part II - Let's Assemble

Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part I - Anatomy of a Widget Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part II - Let's Assemble Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets - Part IIIA - Using Dojo To Bring It Together This is two part of my five part series "Creating Twitter Bootstrap Widgets".   As I mentioned in part one of this series, Twitter Bootstrap widgets are built from a collection standard HTML elements, styled, and programmed to function as a single unit. The goal of this series is to teach you how to create a Bootstrap widget that utilizes the Bootstrap CSS and Dojo. The use of Dojo with Bootstrap is very limited with the exception of Kevin Armstrong who did an incredible job with his Dojo Bootstrap, http://dojobootstrap.com. Our example is a combo box that we are building to replace the standard Bootstrap combo box. In part one, we built a widget that looks like a combo box but did not have a drop down menu associated with it to allow the user to make a select

The iPhora Journey - Part 3 - Creating an Integrated UI Framework

The iPhora Journey - Part 1 - Reimagining Domino The iPhora Journey - Part 2 - Domino, the Little Engine that Could The iPhora Journey - Part 3 - Creating an Integrated UI Framework There are many ways to create the user interface (UI) for a web application. The HTML page could be created on the server and then pushed out. It could be static with the data generated on the page by the server with JavaScript, providing a more dynamic experience, or the server could generate new HTML content to update portions of the web page. XPages or PHP are good examples of this. Another method is to have the web page partially generated by the server and have JavaScript build the rest of the HTML by pulling data from the server via an API. This is the approach used in the Single Page Application (SPA) model. In all cases, it is still dependent on the web server technology being using.  As mentioned previously in this blog, XPages is dependent on complete integration between form and document, which e