Domino Designer 6: A Developer's Handbook -In this IBM Redbook, we describe how to develop applications with IBM Lotus Domino Designer 6. With Domino Designer, you are able to create applications hosted by a Domino server. These applications can be used by different clients, such as Notes clients, Web browsers or mobile devices.
We introduce, and show in detail, how you can use all the design elements of Domino Designer, such as forms, pages, views, agents, outlines, resources and framesets. Readers who are familiar with developing applications using Release 5 of Lotus Domino may want to start at Chapter 12, which introduces the new features in Domino 6.0, and continue from there.
In the chapters toward the end of the book, we discuss the different programming languages, @functions, LotusScript, JavaScript, and Java, that can be used in Domino. We detail how to manipulate rich text objects by programming, as well as XML, in Domino.
This redbook was written for technical specialists, developers and programmers, customers, IBM Business Partners, and the IBM and Lotus community who need technical understanding of how to develop applications using IBM Lotus Domino Designer 6.0.
Domino Designer 6 Technical Overview -The vision of what constitutes a Domino application is expanding—it’s not just an NSF file anymore. Now it’s data from relational sources, cascading style sheets, and layered pages. Domino Designer is expanding to keep pace. That is what Domino Designer 6 is all about.
""Designer is an integrated development environment,"" says Martha Hoyt, Lotus Senior Manager for Collaborative Application Development. ""It has to do two things. One is database development, building the way to get data into the application. The other is the graphical user interface for the presentation of the application’s contents.""
Maureen Leland, Project Leader for Domino Designer, says that her team’s goal for Domino Designer 6 has been to give developers ""the ability to do whatever you want, the way you want to do it. If you want to work in HTML, you can. If you want to use a third-party application to edit a design element, you can.""
When Leland and Hoyt talk about and demo Domino Designer 6, five major areas of focus for improvements in this new version emerge:
Managing complex applications. Domino Designer 6 provides better support both for managing applications that span multiple databases and include objects that aren’t traditional elements of an NSF file, and for third-party tools to use on the design elements of those applications.
Reusability. As Domino applications become larger and more complex more code can be reused. Domino Designer 6 includes many changes that make that reusability easier.
Presentation development. The Web has fundamentally changed the presentation of content, and Domino Designer 6 includes many changes and additions that bring the creation and management of new presentation elements, like layers and style sheets, into the IDE (Integrated Design Environment). At the same time, these changes are intended to make Designer a tool that leverages the skills of Web designers, as well as Notes developers.
Database development. Many of the changes in Domino Designer 6 are intended to make it easier for developers to do the basic work of building an application—from small UI changes to major additions like type-ahead for @functions, HTML in the programmer's pane, the Data Connections resource type, and features to support mobile applications.
Agent design and management. The agent interface has been redesigned and agent properties have been enhanced. And from Domino Designer 6, you can attach to and debug agents running on the server.
