Actually... I would tend to agree with the Advisor article up until the point where he says that Domino forms and such are really great and solve JSP's problems. So here's my background - I develop Domino stuff 9-5 and then go home and do app dev for a the Minnesota Green party. While the specific tools we're using may be swapped out (PostgreSQL, perl, apache, mod_perl) the design philosophy just *rocks* in comparison to Domino. Essentially we've gone over to the MVC world where I have a gaggle of objects managing all the data and the the 'M'odel part of MVC. The PostgreSQL data store handles persistence (MySQL will be good enough in a couple years when it has all the features that PostgreSQL has right now. It's not good enough yet.)
The HTML and other interfaces (the 'V' part of MVC) uses the perl module HTML::Template but really we could have used most of anything (we almost did XML to HTML/PDF via XSLT pipes). This is the one part that is closest to Domino and forms-style development. You code up your HTML, stick some tags which just insert data in at the right places. The whole rest of the app sits in the 'C'ontroller part of the schema. That's CGI::Application class system where all the specific actions are inherited from whatever application is being worked with. This gets us beyond the JSP/ASP/PHP world where you develop a set of pages with embedded code. This is beyond CGI where the HTML is embedded into the code. This is beyond Domino where *everything* is glommed together in one mess.
In general, it's pretty damn sweet and I'm dearly wishing for accomodation from the IBM labs to enable me to push Domino the ways I'd like to push it. An interesting feature of going with this OO model of an application is that now I and the other people on the GPM dev team are getting ready to take on aspect oriented programming (AOP). My novice impression is that there's a heck of alot of expressive power in AOP and our MVC is putting us right on the track to get there.
I'm missing OOP design in Domino. I'm missing assertions. I'm missing functional programming. All in all... Domino as a dev environment is feeling more and more like a nuclear power kiddy bike. It's damn powerful and can do the same thing a regular bike can do - it just isn't quite the right fit. So I think that current web dev is moving on past where Domino stopped (maybe R7 will catch up again).
Actually... I would tend to agree with the Advisor article up until the point where he says that Domino forms and such are really great and solve JSP's problems. So here's my background - I develop Domino stuff 9-5 and then go home and do app dev for a the Minnesota Green party. While the specific tools we're using may be swapped out (PostgreSQL, perl, apache, mod_perl) the design philosophy just *rocks* in comparison to Domino. Essentially we've gone over to the MVC world where I have a gaggle of objects managing all the data and the the 'M'odel part of MVC. The PostgreSQL data store handles persistence (MySQL will be good enough in a couple years when it has all the features that PostgreSQL has right now. It's not good enough yet.)
The HTML and other interfaces (the 'V' part of MVC) uses the perl module HTML::Template but really we could have used most of anything (we almost did XML to HTML/PDF via XSLT pipes). This is the one part that is closest to Domino and forms-style development. You code up your HTML, stick some tags which just insert data in at the right places. The whole rest of the app sits in the 'C'ontroller part of the schema. That's CGI::Application class system where all the specific actions are inherited from whatever application is being worked with. This gets us beyond the JSP/ASP/PHP world where you develop a set of pages with embedded code. This is beyond CGI where the HTML is embedded into the code. This is beyond Domino where *everything* is glommed together in one mess.
In general, it's pretty damn sweet and I'm dearly wishing for accomodation from the IBM labs to enable me to push Domino the ways I'd like to push it. An interesting feature of going with this OO model of an application is that now I and the other people on the GPM dev team are getting ready to take on aspect oriented programming (AOP). My novice impression is that there's a heck of alot of expressive power in AOP and our MVC is putting us right on the track to get there.
I'm missing OOP design in Domino. I'm missing assertions. I'm missing functional programming. All in all... Domino as a dev environment is feeling more and more like a nuclear power kiddy bike. It's damn powerful and can do the same thing a regular bike can do - it just isn't quite the right fit. So I think that current web dev is moving on past where Domino stopped (maybe R7 will catch up again).