@Ed: First, I hope you are well. Since I suppose your comments were directed at my support for Jake's perspective, I think I should reply, if not just for clarification sake. The fact is that my post was to be construed in the context of this original article and subsequent comments. In that respect, perhaps you could say that my comments were 'narrow' in scope, versus my having a narrow view.
While it's true that I failed to speak up earlier through participation in the beta forum, it warrants note that the DOCTYPE issue I mentioned in my previous comment has been something of a sore spot for all of us that develop web-based Domino apps for a number of years. If you do a quick search in the Forum (even for 4/5) on notes.net (err... developerworks), you'll find that there are more than a few posts on the subject. To add the ability to specify what appears above the html tag could not possibly be that difficult to do for the smart folks at IBM that it's been overlooked through four years of development -- and yet it has.
This leads me to believe that there is a disconnect between the development team at IBM and those of us who use the products in commercial development. I know you won't disagree that the real world is not a controlled environment where everyone uses the same browser (not to mention browser version). It's not even a place where companies use the client or browser to the exclusion of the other. What may seem to the un-initiated as a meaningless bit of generated text that Domino places at the top of the page is, in fact, a source of hours of extra development time for so many of us! This is costly to me as a developer and to my clients, who are of course, your (IBM's) customers too.
I'll reiterate what Jake so perfectly (and humorously) brought to light: there are actually browsers out there other than MSIE. If you've ever developed a Domino-based web application for external clients, to whom you can't dictate which browser they use, you know that at every step along the way, you are constantly checking to see how things display from one browser to the next. The addition of a means to do this from within Designer is more than just a convenience, it's a necessity.
To that end, do you know how much time it would save the average web developer to simply be able to edit stylesheets in Designer? After all, it's text for goodness sake! It's not like this would require much effort to add to Designer. However, all Domino web developers know that you can add hours to your development time in order to tweak your stylesheets, because to do so you must: check the design in all of your browsers, switch to another program, change that 3px reference to 4px, save the css file, go back to Designer, switch to the shared resources, select the css file, click the refresh button, click ok on the dialog box, switch back to your form/page/view, and check it all over again in your various browsers. All of those steps to simply change a 3 to a 4 on your stylesheet. Now, repeat that about 20 times per form/page/view that you design.
I'm really not being narrow-minded here, Ed, but please don't offer me AutoSave or LS Debugger improvements as a reply to a very pointed (and valid) commentary about the lack of enhancements 7.0 offers Domino web developers. And, it's worth mentioning that I have not had any engagements this year that have been exclusively for the Notes client. I'm certainly not saying that the client is no longer a place that people work, but it's very clear to me that the browser has become the 'client' of choice for many organizations. With that in mind, it is ostensibly an area that IBM should look to continuously improve in terms of efficiency in the development environment, richer functionality, and streamlined application development.
As for the enhancements that 7.0 does offer, I'm sure that they are great. To say that I am disappointed with the product overall is simply a misquote of my post. Frankly, I'm a bit disappoint that my comments were taken out of their original context. My work has been squarely rooted in web-based application development for the last year, and my clients sit very much in the SMB space. In both regards, DB2 integration offers very little in terms of improvements, which was the point of my comment you paraphrased.
In the end, I'm still a Lotus devotee, admirer...some might say zealot. Simply put, I think that IBM really missed an opportunity to provide enhancements that not only seem to be well past their time, but would have offered significant returns for those of us in the developer community.
@Ed: First, I hope you are well. Since I suppose your comments were directed at my support for Jake's perspective, I think I should reply, if not just for clarification sake. The fact is that my post was to be construed in the context of this original article and subsequent comments. In that respect, perhaps you could say that my comments were 'narrow' in scope, versus my having a narrow view.
While it's true that I failed to speak up earlier through participation in the beta forum, it warrants note that the DOCTYPE issue I mentioned in my previous comment has been something of a sore spot for all of us that develop web-based Domino apps for a number of years. If you do a quick search in the Forum (even for 4/5) on notes.net (err... developerworks), you'll find that there are more than a few posts on the subject. To add the ability to specify what appears above the html tag could not possibly be that difficult to do for the smart folks at IBM that it's been overlooked through four years of development -- and yet it has.
This leads me to believe that there is a disconnect between the development team at IBM and those of us who use the products in commercial development. I know you won't disagree that the real world is not a controlled environment where everyone uses the same browser (not to mention browser version). It's not even a place where companies use the client or browser to the exclusion of the other. What may seem to the un-initiated as a meaningless bit of generated text that Domino places at the top of the page is, in fact, a source of hours of extra development time for so many of us! This is costly to me as a developer and to my clients, who are of course, your (IBM's) customers too.
I'll reiterate what Jake so perfectly (and humorously) brought to light: there are actually browsers out there other than MSIE. If you've ever developed a Domino-based web application for external clients, to whom you can't dictate which browser they use, you know that at every step along the way, you are constantly checking to see how things display from one browser to the next. The addition of a means to do this from within Designer is more than just a convenience, it's a necessity.
To that end, do you know how much time it would save the average web developer to simply be able to edit stylesheets in Designer? After all, it's text for goodness sake! It's not like this would require much effort to add to Designer. However, all Domino web developers know that you can add hours to your development time in order to tweak your stylesheets, because to do so you must: check the design in all of your browsers, switch to another program, change that 3px reference to 4px, save the css file, go back to Designer, switch to the shared resources, select the css file, click the refresh button, click ok on the dialog box, switch back to your form/page/view, and check it all over again in your various browsers. All of those steps to simply change a 3 to a 4 on your stylesheet. Now, repeat that about 20 times per form/page/view that you design.
I'm really not being narrow-minded here, Ed, but please don't offer me AutoSave or LS Debugger improvements as a reply to a very pointed (and valid) commentary about the lack of enhancements 7.0 offers Domino web developers. And, it's worth mentioning that I have not had any engagements this year that have been exclusively for the Notes client. I'm certainly not saying that the client is no longer a place that people work, but it's very clear to me that the browser has become the 'client' of choice for many organizations. With that in mind, it is ostensibly an area that IBM should look to continuously improve in terms of efficiency in the development environment, richer functionality, and streamlined application development.
As for the enhancements that 7.0 does offer, I'm sure that they are great. To say that I am disappointed with the product overall is simply a misquote of my post. Frankly, I'm a bit disappoint that my comments were taken out of their original context. My work has been squarely rooted in web-based application development for the last year, and my clients sit very much in the SMB space. In both regards, DB2 integration offers very little in terms of improvements, which was the point of my comment you paraphrased.
In the end, I'm still a Lotus devotee, admirer...some might say zealot. Simply put, I think that IBM really missed an opportunity to provide enhancements that not only seem to be well past their time, but would have offered significant returns for those of us in the developer community.