…to places you’ve never been before. Of course, you see new things, but to get there, you’re still driving that old crappy car that really needs replacement. It has a problem starting in the morning, it requires way to much care, and as it’s not driving as fast anymore it takes a lot of time to get there.

That’s sort of how I feel about the Domino Designer these days. Sure, I can build Ajax enabled databases with it, sure I can use it to build nifty web enabled stuff. But to do it, it feels I’m driving a really old car. I have the feeling that most of the time I’m coding -around- the ‘features’ the Designer client gives me rather than -using- the features it gives me. The fact that the Domino Designer -has- (at least until now) to support both the Notes Client and a web browser client stopped it from being the ultimate killer application for me. The Notes application model is good, it’s a solid way of working with a back-end storage. However, regarding the Designer… For instance: how difficult can it be to include a document type (like text/xml or anything) on a view? Without me needing to embed the view on page.

Please Hannover, where are you? And while we’re talking about you, Dear Hannover, will you be able to impress me?

In an ideal world (this if of course my view on things): scrap the designer, leave the notes database in place and create something like eclipse/visual studio to allow me to use the back-end model. And I don’t mean: put a websphere server in place and use the Domino Tag library. That’s solving a problem with introducing a rather ‘interesting’ overhead (not even to speak about licensing). And for using Workplace: the market does not seem ready yet for Workplace, at least not among the customers I’m working with. Domino is the thing. And most (if not all) want me to create databases running in a webbrowser. Which means I’m trying to code my way around the client things the designer is ‘helping me with’. Can you PLEASE include a switch in Hannover saying : Do -not- generate ANY html code automatically. The time development environments generated -unmodifiable- code is over. Thank you.