Arjan, I can pretty much guarantee that you are grossly underestimating the effort involved. There is work under way to create a "Designer Lite" (particularly as a web client), but:
1. the user would still need to have a core competency with Notes and Domino;
2. since the user may not be a career Notes/Domino developer, any design elements created (and yes, there always needs to be a corresponding Designer form) need to be verified and validated, then checked, calibrated and run through an x-ray machine before saving;
3. the Notes client is not, and never will be, a good candidate for the "Designer Lite" application because it does not have provisions for anything like positionable widgets (where the web gives us DHTML); and
4. maintaining the forms in Designer yourself is absolutely NOTHING compared to repairing damage to the database (and,perhaps, the server) if anything mentioned above gets broken. You can make a user-configurable form yourself in Designer and let the users "shape" the result with a set-up document. You're not afraid of hide-whens and computed text, are you?
"Designer Lite" makes sense for single-database hosted sites (a "website in a box"; not to be confused with a DelMarva product having the same name) with relatively limited functionality, where users without access to Designer (and with less than Designer access to their database) can configure and assemble the toolkit they're given (probably as part of the standard "blank" template).
If our Jake (or any guest columnist) can find a way to work this into an article, I'd be more than a little bit surprised. The end-user instructions alone would take up several week's postings....
Arjan, I can pretty much guarantee that you are grossly underestimating the effort involved. There is work under way to create a "Designer Lite" (particularly as a web client), but:
1. the user would still need to have a core competency with Notes and Domino;
2. since the user may not be a career Notes/Domino developer, any design elements created (and yes, there always needs to be a corresponding Designer form) need to be verified and validated, then checked, calibrated and run through an x-ray machine before saving;
3. the Notes client is not, and never will be, a good candidate for the "Designer Lite" application because it does not have provisions for anything like positionable widgets (where the web gives us DHTML); and
4. maintaining the forms in Designer yourself is absolutely NOTHING compared to repairing damage to the database (and,perhaps, the server) if anything mentioned above gets broken. You can make a user-configurable form yourself in Designer and let the users "shape" the result with a set-up document. You're not afraid of hide-whens and computed text, are you?
"Designer Lite" makes sense for single-database hosted sites (a "website in a box"; not to be confused with a DelMarva product having the same name) with relatively limited functionality, where users without access to Designer (and with less than Designer access to their database) can configure and assemble the toolkit they're given (probably as part of the standard "blank" template).
If our Jake (or any guest columnist) can find a way to work this into an article, I'd be more than a little bit surprised. The end-user instructions alone would take up several week's postings....