Genii Weblog


Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Thu 6 Nov 2003, 05:10 PM
I have actually heard a couple of IBMers mention ND 8.0, but I was even more surprised to see this latest article about the Lotus Workplace launch on SearchDomino.com.  The article has this quote from Larry Bowden, IBM vice president of Lotus products:

"The Domino application server will be around for the next decade"

The next decade!  Ironically, this still launched a worried thread in the Notes 6 Gold forum about whether that didn't indicate that after the next decade Domino might be obsolete, but I think most of us can reasonably see that this is a pretty strong statement for IBM.  So, are you still worried about the barbarians at the gate?

Copyright © 2003 Genii Software Ltd.

Thu 6 Nov 2003, 12:50 PM
So, it is interesting to see the Microsofties talking about the incredible value in a rich client.  Here, from his Better Living Through Software blog, Joshua Allen talks about Grid Computing and Rich Client.  My favorite quote, and clearly that of others given the trackbacks, is:

"The fact that people have trouble imagining uses for rich client is more evidence that HTML has had a blinding effect on people's imaginations than evidence that there are a lack of such applications."

Make Sanders challenges Microsoft to make the business case for rich clients, and Robert Scoble does his best to  rise to the challenge, with lots of comments and trackbacks and everything.

I love this stuff.  Some of you have seem dubious when you hear we are working on products such as COEX! Web Edit and projects such as the Midas Reloaded project to build rich text programmability for IBM's new Rich Client.  Read these discussions, and maybe you'll start to see not only why we are working on what we are, but why IBM is all of a sudden more gung ho about Notes/Domino and what it can componetize from Notes/Domino, and also more gung ho for the new rich client.  It is our goal to bind the fate of Notes/Domino and IBM more closely by strengthening the rich client and the Notes client and making them more interoperable.

Still dubious?

Copyright © 2003 Genii Software Ltd.

Thu 6 Nov 2003, 12:24 PM
Well, I wrote about a new sample db I created for Rocky Oliver, Lotus Geek, in this post.  Rocky responded nicely in this post on his Lotus Geek site.  Of course, within a day, somebody wrote plaintively asking whether I could create action hotspots that worked on the web.  Sheesh!  There is no satisfying people <grin>.

The Action Hotspots sample I wrote for download (see the Sample downloads) didn't seem quite meaty enough for an on-line sample of its own, so I whipped up a companion to the fairly popular Create Page Dynamically on-line demo.  The new one is called Create Form Dynamically, and it just shows how you can create your own dynamic form and save it in our database here.  It shows how to created a field, includes an embedded view, and that sort of stuff, but to appease those who want more action hotspots, it also includes a text hotspot or button hotspot which handles the submit.

Only trouble is, while it is fun for a few minutes and shows a bit of functionality, it doesn't begin to touch on what you can do with dynamic forms generations.  It doesn't go anywhere near as far as Forms Design sample you can download.  So, for you all out there, I have a challenge.  Tell me how you would like this demo modified.  Tell me things you would like to see added, like configurable fields or field formulas or whatever, so long as it will work in this extremely constrained context of our website, and I'll change it before your very eyes.  Want to add some passthru HTML to show an IFRAME with our Help database?  Want the action hotspots to do some really cool JavaScript tricks? Just say the word, and I'll do my best to comply.

Don't wait for Rocky to respond though.  I think he is lazing about on a beach somewhere, and won't even see this till he gets back.

Copyright © 2003 Genii Software Ltd.