I think it will be really hard to attract new Domino developers. The Domino development has still quite a few strong points, but it lacks in certain features that modern programmers take for granted these days.
For example:
- Lack of source control. In the <insert language here>-world, SVN or CVS are commonly used for source control, mainly because it's free. In the Domino world, you have to spent a lot of cash for a decent source-control system.
- Trivial taks take a long time to accomplish (and no, I'm not kidding). Try to change the background-ground of all your views in a database. Imagine this is a database which consists of 50+ views. Ofcourse, there are external tools that allow you to do this, but once again, they ain't cheap. In a dotnet or pure java environment for example, you just store those settings somewhere (ini-file, db, whatever).
- Speed and stability of Lotus Notes have decreased since the R8 eclipse-based release. Since the Designer became eclipse-based too, even the most simple task like opening a Database design element takes forever. Oh well, at least we have auto-completion of our own classes now ... that's something already.
I think it will be really hard to attract new Domino developers. The Domino development has still quite a few strong points, but it lacks in certain features that modern programmers take for granted these days.
For example:
- Lack of source control. In the <insert language here>-world, SVN or CVS are commonly used for source control, mainly because it's free. In the Domino world, you have to spent a lot of cash for a decent source-control system.
- Trivial taks take a long time to accomplish (and no, I'm not kidding). Try to change the background-ground of all your views in a database. Imagine this is a database which consists of 50+ views. Ofcourse, there are external tools that allow you to do this, but once again, they ain't cheap. In a dotnet or pure java environment for example, you just store those settings somewhere (ini-file, db, whatever).
- Speed and stability of Lotus Notes have decreased since the R8 eclipse-based release. Since the Designer became eclipse-based too, even the most simple task like opening a Database design element takes forever. Oh well, at least we have auto-completion of our own classes now ... that's something already.