Here is your market opportunity
by Volker Weber
There is an extreme shortage of people who know how to develop applications on top of Lotus Expeditor. Acquire this skill and make tons of money.
Having said that, it is very well possible that Expeditor dies of developer shortage. Customers might be running scared.
Comments
I keep an eye out for Expeditor-related work here in the UK, but I don’t see anything coming up to be honest.
As a developer, if you know Eclipse development, Expeditor follows on pretty well.
I have no difficulty finding you Expeditor-related work. Not in the UK though.
How do I aquire those skills, provided that I am a standard Lotus Notes developer? Any good books? What do I need besides an Lotus Notes R8 client? Servers?
Is there such a thing as a “standard” Lotus Notes developer? :)
Do you know Java? If not, start there.
There are some good books on Eclipse plug-in development which could be useful for starting with Expeditor. After that, you need to download the toolkit and play with all the stuff in developerWorks. But remember that for anyone working with this stuff right now, it’s a steep learning curve still. It’s all very new.
Oh, and read, read again, and then read AGAIN when editing XML files—that’s where I had the most grief in doing Expeditor labs at IBM Hursley!
Which company is in devil-may-care mood at the moment for a R8 upgrade? :)
Therefore, I don't expect a demand of "Expeditor developers" before release 8.0.1 .
You may not see it. But it's there.
Expeditor is the foundation of the Eclipse based Notes client but it is an independent product that, in theory, can be used for other stuff as well.
Expeditor Homepage
Some pricing example
Dear market partners, you are completely right: There is no demand for Expeditor in the market and there will be no market until 2012. Lay down and relax, because there still is the Notes 8 Standard Client, so: no need to talk with customers about the exciting new opportunities of Eclipse RCP and composite applications. Don't worry about the exploding Eclipse Community, they are not really "Notes minded", so are they worth enough to think about?
;-)
Don't give up on Expeditor development yet, we're going to make it a lot easier (at least, we think so)
Dear Expeditor Developpers,
I wish a few of you were available for some customer projects we are currently dealing with.
There is some demand. Yes its slow but a first brickstone to get customers going. Some RPC projects are currently beeing kicked off and resources are searched at least within Switzerland.
English is required, French would be a big plus.
Anyone interested ?
ROTFLMAO.
Expeditor is only just getting started. I compare to LotusScript when it first came through in Notes 4. You used it rarely, to get out of a tight corner and get some UI functionality you otherwise just couldn't do. It was hard to figure out, and many developers never transitioned from version 3.x to 4.x and beyond.
Today, 10 years later, LotusScript is second nature to nearly any Notes developer.
The same people who are whining and moaning about how hard it is to code for Expeditor are full of Ohhhh's and ahhhhh's over the simplest little side bar and menu enhancement applications that are starting to trickle out.
Given tools that mature and a developer community that grows its skills (hoping for an increase in maturity may be too much) the Expeditor platform offers a way out of so many of the tight corners Notes developers live with now that its success is -- in my considered opinion -- a sure thing.
Agree with Andrew. Although it may not seem like it, Expeditor is actually a fairly mature product since it is really the WCTME stack with some additional window dressing in the last year.
You don't need Notes to have a reason for Expeditor. Remember, this is a full micro J2EE stack with data services, java services, offline capability, pretty much everything you could ask for...all in a local client. While Notes may help in actually getting wider deployment, there are people who need Expeditor that have no need for Notes.
I had some conversations a few months ago with some IBMers about taking legacy MS VB apps and porting them to run as managed client code on Expeditor. How nice would that be, since MS doesn't give them a way to move forward with those old VB apps. People are looking for that today!
So yes, I think there is plenty of opportunity for Expeditor to grow and have a significant presence, with or without Notes as its driver.
Who is whining or moaning here?
I think this entry started with opportunity and tons of money and comments confirmed a demand.
