Sometimes it's a good idea to let blog posts marinate a bit before releasing them to the world.... the post that went with this title was a long whine about the fact that I've lost my Notes developer skills and miss the chance to do heads down coding.
I went on and on about my history with 4GLs, database development IDEs and scripting languages. My job history leading to my current over taxed technical management / systems administration job and how the developing bug has been woken back up recently after having to poke through a few older databases and reading through some developer blogs.
Truth is... I don't have time to immerse myself in development. My last structured programming was COBOL and Turbo Pascal in college over twenty years ago. I did plenty of programming but it was all with proprietary 4GL languages or scripting systems where the idea was to do more with less coding. The great thing about Notes development when I was involved (Release 3 and 4) was the RAD development, forms designer and formula language.
The bulk of our early Notes development was small single database programs for tracking support calls or computer equipment or IT projects. The best used the functions Notes was great at unstructured data and workflow ... the worst just used Notes as a useful tool and could have been written in MS Access... the important thing was we didn't use Access and didn't walk down the Microsoft path. Remarkably they're still there - butt ugly but running fine on Domino 7.
What I'd really like is a quick and dirty way to pretty up the old databases I created in R3. Extreme Makeover Lotus Notes Edition. I'd also love a way to quickly add Blackberry support to older databases that are still in use and a way to re-skin old apps that used non-web supported functions like layout regions for use on the web. A large number of our early Notes 3 apps will work on the web but they look pitiful. It would also be great to be able to apply a single common style to all the old non-standard ugly old databases we wrote when we thought turquoise or yellow were visually appealing user interface colors.
Short of finding a magical tool that will let me do all this...I need a resource for guerilla Notes development - something that doesn't expect me to learn Lotuscript or Java but teaches me how to go back and quickly update the visual elements of my old programs. I need a tutorial or sample code to allow me to add Blackberry support for existing apps. I need a good tutorial on webifying existing data.... and I need a tutorial that walks me through the basics of designing forms, views and actions in the current IDE to let me resurrect the skills I did have with R3 to create small, useful, one-off programs with Notes - so I don't have to find a developer or use another tool.
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2 comments:
Hey Chuck,
Did you look at Ext.ND at all? It might let you web-enable those R3 databases with minimal effort. I've never tried it with anything that old, but I'm sure it would give you a major head start on things. It's on OpenNTF, of course.
@rob - I'll have to look at it.
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