Notes & Domino 9.0 Gold – A Few of My Favourite Things

Now that Notes & Domino 9.0 Social Edition is gold, here are a few highlights of new functionality I particularly like.

Source Pane Enhancements
There are two significant benefits for XPages development here. The first is hyperlink navigation to Custom Controls. This has already saved me a lot of time during the betas. Most of my time is spent in the source pane, so being able to press Ctrl and click through to the custom control from the Source pane is very helpful. It also gets round the problem of using the Design pane to navigate to Custom Controls where, if a custom control was nested, sometimes it didn’t open the one you wanted. All in all, a great enhancement and thanks, Dan, for listening that Monday evening in the showcase at Lotusphere 2012.

The second is content assist in SSJS in the source pane. I would recommend tweaking the delay to ensure it’s not excessively used, but it’s very useful to get quick content assist rather than launching the SSJS editors.

Extension Library
The inclusion of the Extension Library in the core install marks the culmination of a road started in September 2010 with the first release on OpenNTF. Having said that, I’m a little bit nervous about versioning issues: there’s the R9 version, the UP1 version and the OpenNTF version. I hope I’m being over-sensitive in pre-empting some conflict between the version I have installed and the version that gets used.

Close Application
Developers who have not extensively used the Package Explorer may not be used to closing applications. But it’s something every developer should do. Build All builds all open applications and searches, by default, search all open applications. So closing applications once you’ve finished improves performance across the board as well as being best practice. But I would point developers also to the right-click menu option “Close Unrelated Projects” in Package Explorer. This closes all applications except the current application.

Application Configuration
The new Application Configuration area is particularly useful. All xsp properties have been moved out into their own editor. But to help muscle memory, there’s a link across to them from the Application Properties. Once an XPage has been created (which initialises the faces-config file) you also have access to the faces-config.xml from this area. Along with the Java and JAR design elements, this makes it easier for newer developers to take advantage of managed beans and more. I’m still not 100% confident with the Java design elements and I would also recommend any developer gets familiar with the Package Explorer though. So although this makes it easier in some ways to use Java in XPages, for me it’s a bit of a crutch. It makes it harder for developers to advance into OSGi plugin development by giving them a more in-your-face option that is not of use outside the NSF.

SSJS Debugger
This isn’t a tool I’ve used extensively, but I see it being used quite a bit by developers. One point for developers to bear in mind is that some code – rendered properties etc. – gets processed multiple times during the JSF lifecycle. Novice developers have been shielded from that to a large degree and I envisage some confusion. I think this – like source control and sessionAsSigner – will increase the requirement for developers to work on a local development server.

Quick Find and Search
The new quick find box – a combination of Starts With and Find – is very powerful. Highlight this to your users. It is a great enhancement that makes finding content even easier. Another nice tweak is moving the sort results order selection for Full Text searches from within the “More” area to the main search bar. Both are great pieces of functionality that set the client above the browser.

Sort by Date
This is not a good enhancement to the Mail database. It’s a great one. I’m struggling to imagine how I coped with this and the abbreviated date format prior to R9.

Social Theme
The new look and feel for the client is excellent – clean and beautiful. Add to this the much enhanced fidelity between Notes mail and iNotes and we have a much smarter look and feel.

Embedded Experiences
I’m yet to really dig into embedded experiences, but I’m expecting them to be a key development tool for the coming years. I believe there is still work to do on oAuth around the NSF, as well as displaying embedded experiences on mobile. I get the feeling that embedded experiences in 9.0 are a bit like XPages in 8.5.0. But I confidently predict they will have a big future and be much more heavily implemented than Composite Applications or Web Services.

Having said that, anyone who has opened the Wiki database in Notes client on 8.5.x and 9.0 will notice that the social theme gets automatically applied to Composite Applications. That looks good, but I can’t see it being a reason for using Composite Applications.

Discover Pages
These are both in Notes Client and Domino Designer Client and offer a host of functionality. I still need to investigate further but, from what I am aware, they can be extended. I particularly like the option in the Domino Designer Client to see applications not in a working set.

Summary
All in all, R9.0 is a step forward in Notes client and XPages, without a significant change in what’s under the hood. However, it does leave the Admin client looking rather dated – and despite being a developer, I do use it. Having said that, my call would still be to separate the Designer client from Notes, or alternatively providing an XPages development IDE as a plugin to Eclipse. That would help move XPages development beyond the yellow bubble. And the Amin client is still, by all I hear, better than admin management tools for other platforms.