Let's connect some dots
by Volker Weber
We also see this feature release as the first place you'll recognize our Project Vulcan vision, and that includes a shift to making web and mobile interfaces a primary experience.
The client is a choice, not a requirement, in the future. More customers asking for this approach.
The Transformer has been part of almost every customer conversation I've had in the last few months. ... Modernization, either through the Transformer tool or other XPages practitioners, brings those existing Notes apps to a modern, web 2.0-based UI, accessible on all browsers, as part of a portal, or on mobile devices.
Former Notes apps in the browser, access from mobile devices, tactical bet on Transformer. That's a good survival strategy where Notes is about to be dumped for Exchange. The only thing you need to solve is identity.
Some people love the Notes client. Many people don't. None of them cares about the server, apart from the admins of course. Updating the client is expensive, updating the server is not. Come to think of it, updating the server has always been simple compared to other solutions.
Comments
It actually wouldn't be very hard to strip the Domino server down, so it runs as a single user service (Windows) or daemon (Mac/Linux) and use the browser exclusively. The C++/Eclipse bridge in the current Notes client is a lot of duct tape. With a local server all the cross domain issues that would plague browser only apps can be dealt with.
My favorite solution: local XPages engine, Eclipse/Expeditor framework (there are some things a composite is simply better) and done away with client code. Security (signature/encryption) need to be sorted out for that.
:-) stw
Hypothetically speaking - If I had a company who had invested thousands/millions of dollars into Notes and Domino and the full client, only for it to be abandoned by IBM, the very last thing I would do is invest in any web-based IBM technology. Plus, once you've got your information web based, you might as well move to something else.
Nobody is talking about abandoning anything.
We are building a Notes client for 8.5.3 and for the next feature release with new features and improvements. But as vowe says, some love the client, many don't. More and more corporate customers are telling us they would prefer to do browser-based deployments, and I want to make sure we are leading in that direction.
If I could rewrite the 3rd thing linked above, I would more-explicitly call out the ability of XPages to run in the Notes client, which is OK in 8.5.2 and improving in 8.5.3. Clearly the benefit of a single UI on Notes client/web browser/mobile device is a reason to use XPages for that app.
I'm not sure why moving to web applications would drive a move to something else, because time and time again we've seen that the benefits of Domino are more than just around the UI, they extend into directory, security, replication, storage, etc. If anything, the ability to refactor into XPages is keeping existing customers who hadn't upgraded in the Domino family.
I actually quite liked Stephan's suggestion.
