Here are my impressions of the sessions I saw this afternoon:

Workplace Designer for Domino Developers - Rob Novak

I've seen slides and demos of Workplace Designer before (notably at the demo given by Ed Wrenbeck at the DNP DominoFest held on 4/12/05), but this session gave me the most in-depth look at this product to date. Now at version number 2.6, its definitely beginning to look more like a working product. However, I have some concerns about how it will be embraced by the Notes/Domino developer community. For starters, it consumes well over a gig of RAM when running. I don't know about you, but I'm assuming that most folks don't have laptops with that much RAM, or the capacity to use that much RAM. Second, being able to do development when disconnected seems to be a chore. I know, this is the age of DSL and Broadband and cable modems, but I hate the idea of needing to be connected all the time in order to be able to do any development or troubleshooting when away from my office network. Third, the skills needed to develop in this product are considerable. Not only do you need to know JavaScript, but also XML, XPATH, XSD (schemas), and how either Workplace Collaborative Services or Workplace Services Express work. In my opinion, many developers who've only developed applications for the Notes client will not be able to develop in this platform without considerable training. Here's hoping that when v3.0 is released sometime next year, the product will be much easier to develop applications with than it is today. (A side note: the presenter, while having one year of experience with the product, has not developed any production applications for customers yet. Take that however you want.)

Lotus Notes-to-Web: Advanced Web Development - Scott Good

I always enjoy watching Scott give a presentation. His energy is contagious, and you can really tell that he enjoys what he does for a living. Scott presented for the DNP back on 8/28/02, and I'm thinking I have to find a way to get him to speak for me again. I wonder what his favorite beer is...

Anyway, Scott gave an excellent presentation, as always. If you're a Lotus Advisor subscriber, you've probably read the countless articles he's written for them over the years. Most of the techniques he covered I'd already read in the magazine, but it was good to get a refresher course on some things I'd forgotten about, like using the onKeyPress event for JavaScript input validation. We also had an interesting discussion on the use of the innerHTML property, something which is not part of the DOM but can be extremely useful for creating DHTML pages. Scott also covered the use of iFrames, something which I hadn't used before and which seems to have been eclipsed by AJAX. He also went over the difference between a CSS "id" and a "class". An id must be unique to the page, while a class can be used multiple times. I'm planning on seeing Scott's AJAX presentations tomorrow, and I'm expecting them to be very interesting.

The Server Side of Domino 7 Web Services - James Ray

James faced the same challenge I did in my XML presentation: how to present a new (and large) topic in an hour. He did an excellent job giving a primer to what web services are all about, and his sample code was very thorough and could be used by anyone running ND7 in their environment right now. He got caught going into the weeds when trying to explain web services security, or lack thereof. Again, if this session had been broken out into two presentations (beginner and advanced), he would have had more than enough time to get into this particular aspect of web services. Unfortunately, when it came time to give his final demo, debugging a Domino web service using RAD Web Services Debugger, he couldn't quite get it to work. However, I really appreciated knowing that this capability is available within RAD, and is also well documented in the Domino Designer. Great job, James!

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