I was in your position not too long ago and found it difficult initially to move away from thinking like a Domino Dev to thinking like an XPages Dev.  I guess I am lucky as I don't have a boss to glower over me should things take longer than expected, and things did take a lot longer than expected initially.  Now they don't.  I find now that I churn out applications for the web much faster than I did under "classic" Domino Web Development and almost as fast as I can turn out a Notes Application (I did have a 10 year head start as a Notes Dev).

 

The thing that convinced me was the long term future of Domino seems to be rapidly moving towards Java.  Xpages is an implementation of JavaServerFaces and IBM are pushing a huge amount of money and effort into it.

 

The extra work, frustration and learning were well worth it and the best of it was, I found that I didn't even have to throw away a lot of my skills (knowledge of the lotusscript classes is valuable as the vast majority of them are available in Server Side JavaScript, even a lot of the @Functions had been ported to XPages). 

 

The most frustrating thing I found was that things that are easy in Domino/Notes aren't always as easy in XPages (indentation in views for one).  Thankfully, the things that were difficult to do in Notes/Domino are easy in Xpages (@DBLookups in view columns, AJAX, No Need for PasThru HTML!). 

 

I can't remember were I read it, but it was probably in one of the many Yellow-centric blogs out there that the Xpages rule is as follows:  If it is simply impossible to do in Notes, it is impossibly simple to do in XPages.......and sometime vice versa.

 Emily,

 

Xpages is the Domino development platform of the future.  You could stay with Notes Client apps, or even Classic Domino Web apps but they're not exactly adding any new tools to those design patterns.  They are for XPages. XPages is also standards based and compitable with common source control platforms.

 

I assume you are currently building apps with Classic Domino?  If so then what's the effort involved in doing just about anything?  How much HTML code to you need to hide in view columns?  what's the effort in adding a pager to a view?  I honestly don't know the answers to those because I was a client dev for the most part before XPages comes along. But I think Pagers for instance was a significant effort.  The two biggest features to me are:  Repeat Controls and Scoped Variables.  how nice is it to have an in memory variable that can span pages if you want? No cookies needed.

 

If you are a client dev then there's no question.  XPages and it's use of standard html, css, javascript, etc... allows you do have whatever UI you want.  Seperating the document from the form is a big plus as well. I think Scott Good once told me when he looked at his first real XPages demo at Lotusphere.  "We could do everything they just did currently. But it would take a heck of a lot longer to do it." 

 

I don't believe you can easily replicate  repeat controls and scoped variables in classic domino. Certainly not Themes which if more difficult to get into but extremely powerful.  Heck look at the 100+ controls in the ext. library, the tons of snippets at XSnippets, and the other custom controls that the community has contributed free of charge.  Try and replicate those in Classic domino.  Some just aren't going to happen. The ones that might be possibly would take a long time.

 

Check out my 2 jumpstart videos on xpages.tv  Those were done a while ago but were intended to wet the appetite and show you how to do some things.  Many of the other shorter videos probably would be difficult to reproduce in classic domino in the time it took me to do them in XPages. XPages is not perfect, there's work involved and a learning curve, but it's by far better then anything else that we've been doing.

 

If you need more advice just reach out to me.

 

 If an application is done in notes client  so for developing web version of  the same application lots of rework is to be performed but by using  Xpages, applications doesn't requires any rework for client application or web application.

Using Javascript for SSJS(Server side scripting language) and CSJS(Client side scripting language) along with lotus script  or formula's if required is fun.

Xpages allows using standard HTML n CSS is applicable everywhere which allows application UI to be customize as required.

 

 Thanks folks.  XPages does seem to be the way to go. I appreciate you taking the time to post.

 

Emily